Reflections from a Third-Grade Classroom

I had a really good time doing this project, and definitely plan on incorporating WebQuests into my future classroom. I see them as a fantastic means of organizing an involved and integrated unit. There are some things that I’d like to work on in my own WebQuest, and going through it exposed a lot of weaknesses that I plan on addressing in the next. However, I am still happy with the product.

LITERACY

I was completely fascinated by the various forms of literacy identified through this project. In my project, I tried to incorporate the following:

• Environmental
  • The Environmental Literacy Council defines environmental literacy as requiring, “a fundamental understanding of the systems of the natural world, the relationships and interactions between the living and the non-living environment, and the ability to deal sensibly with problems that involve scientific evidence, uncertainty, and economic, aesthetic, and ethical considerations.”
  • In my project, this is a major focus! I believe that the ability to live among our environment without harm is one of the key lessons I can give my students. Part of this includes an understanding of how humans affect the surrounding environment. I addressed this in the following segments: Patagonia, Tuamotu Archipelago, and Tonga Trench.
• Social
  • Jon Davison and James Arthur, in a paper published by citiZED (a teacher-prep research organization in the U.K.) define Social Literacy as, “the development of social skills, knowledge, and positive human values that engender the desire and ability in human beings to act positively and responsibly in range of complex social settings.”
  • I believe that social growth is an important skill to learn. Without social skills, our children will lack an important tool for interacting with the world around them. I implemented aspects of social literacy in the following segments: Patagonia, and Easter Island.
• Visual
  • The International Visual Literacy Association defines Visual Literacy according to John Debes’ 1969 writing, “Visual Literacy refers to a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences. The development of these competencies is fundamental to normal human learning. When developed, they enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounters in his environment. Through the creative use of these competencies, he is able to communicate with others. Through the appreciative use of these competencies, he is able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of visual communication.”
  • I really love visual literacy. Not only do I respect the benefits of learning it for its own sake, I also feel that its a fantastic means of accessing other (more traditional) forms of literacy. I used visual literacy in the following segments: Patagonia, Easter Island, Antarctica, and Whangara.
• Cultural
  • Cultural Literacy is described as, “the ability to converse fluently in the idioms, allusions and informal content which creates and constitutes a dominant culture.”
  • I agree with this definition to a certain extent. I do agree that it is very important to learn the cultural literacy of a dominant culture, as it provides access to cultural capital, which can be exchanged for monetary capital. However, by restricting the focus to the dominant group, I feel like something important is lost. It is almost as if this validates the dominance of this group. I believe that cultural literacy can be studied in a number of contexts, depending on the situation, and that true literacy in this area includes the ability to compare and contrast these cultures. In my project, I had students explore forms of cultural literacy in the following segments: Easter Island, Tuamotu Archipelago, Tonga Trench, Antarctica, and Whangara.
• Emotional
  • The National Emotional Literacy Interest Group defines this literacy as, “the degree to which we are able to recognize, understand, handle and appropriately express our emotions.”
    • This type of literacy is important for both social and personal reasons. Socially, it helps us raise a generation of children who learn to deal with emotions in a non-violent and appropriate manner. Personally, it helps students succeed in future employment, as employees are working in more collaborative ways than previous generations. I have incorporated this literacy into the following sections of my project: Antarctica and Whangara.

My conceptual understanding of these types of literacies has not really changed.  I was familiar with them before I started this project.  Instead,  I’d say that I spent more time specifically thinking about them than I have in the past.  This project gave me an opportunity to really weigh the strengths (and weaknesses) inherent in these literacies.  I found a lot of opportunities for overlap in these literacies.  Also, this project gave me a theoretical justification for things that I already felt were important in my future classroom.

I think that any balanced Language Arts curriculum should stress a  number of these approaches.  For example, I think that students should interact with various types of texts, including graphic novels.  Graphic novels are rich in visual cues and cultural literacy.  Pair a graphic novel with a book club that responds emotionally to the content within, and you’ve incorporated visual, cultural, social, and emotional literacies into one lesson.

TECHNOLOGY

Because I felt it was important to incorporate a number of different literacies into one project, I decided that an involved and integrated unit was the best way to go.  WebQuests provide a fantastic means of organizing a unit.  Students can complete the Quest individually or in groups.  I chose to organize the Quest  around a single text, to provide context.  Whale Rider contains a subplot that involves the migratory journey of whales.  The issues being dealt with by the whales in this subplot beautifully build upon and foreshadow events in the main character’s life.  I decided to focus on this subplot, as a means of organizing the unit.

At fairly regular intervals, there is a chapter that opens with the whales’ story.  I created a “stop” at these points, and developed a writing project to be completed that dealt with the content of the section.  Each section explores a different form of writing, and includes the following:  expository, argumentative, persuasive, textual analysis, descriptive prose, and poetry.

I provided numerous ways to access each stop.  On the homepage, there is a bulleted list of the stops.  However, I also included an interactive map.   By navigating the map, students can get a spatial sense of the path of migration of the whales.   This helps visual and spatial learners with this aspect of the book, which is hard to conceptualize.

As this is my first WebQuest, I chose to use Googlepages to create my WebQuest, primarily for ease of creation. Googlepages has premade “templates” and operate under the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web 2.0 format, much like EduBlogs. However, there are a lot of things that don’t really work for me. I am currently building another WebQuest, this time using Dreamweaver and HTML coding. Although there is more of a “startup cost,” the final product works much better for what I have want, as it is completely customizable. However, for a teacher with little technology experience, Googlepages is a fantastic program that allows a user to build websites quickly and easily. Also, on this page of the Quest, I will be linking to Googlepages. I would like to implement a student portfolio component to this quest, where the students “publish” their completed persuasive essays on the internet. For this, Googlepages is key, as it allows students to easily choose a customizable template and input their text in the same way as any word processor.