David J. Ritchie - Volunteer

Many of the developments on the web have been the result of volunteer efforts. I describe some of my contributions in this area. See What's New for recent updates to this set of web pages.

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Table of Contents

• Copyright
• What's New?
• Purpose
• Background
• Ellsworth Elementary School
  • Art Awareness
  • Water Resource Awareness
• Washington Junior High School
  • An Offline Web Site
  • Teaching Perl

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Copyright

Copyright for the remote materials referenced via the usual hypertext links remains with those that provide the  material on the remote servers.

Copyright for the local material is:

Copyright - 1998 David J. Ritchie.

The local material has been put on this web site in a form as close as possible to that experienced by the students.

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What's New?

1998/07/18: I have added a page with student feedback concerning the Art Awareness effort.
2000/06/29: I have updated the Perl pages (in the Washington Junior High area) with the results of the last two years of effort.

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Purpose

My purpose in presenting this material is to show:

1. what I have done with the web on a volunteer capacity in an education setting, and
2. how one can weave a locally developed, web-based set of lessons together with remote web resources to construct a targeted, customized curriculum unit which is larger than the sum of its parts.

Interior to the presentation, I have tried to separate notes for you, the browser, from the material that was part of the "web" as seen by the student so that it is clear what the students saw on the screen. The separation is done with separate pages (such as this one), with the use of "keyboard" format by itself or set off with horizontal rules.

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Background

What follows is a presentation of the uses of the web for various school education purposes as done at Ellsworth Elementary School and Washington Junior High School in Naperville, Illinois. At the time these approaches were used, Ellsworth and Washington did not have web sites or continuously up network connections. As with many schools, Ellsworth and Washington simply had some computers. In Ellsworth's case, modem connections were available. In Washington's case, a file server and an network internal to the LRC (a LAN) were present. Still, I wanted to bring the students the experience of the web as an information resource in a controlled and curriculum-focused setting.

To this end, in conjunction with the classroom teachers and LRC personnel, I developed local materials for various curriculum units as web-format html and gif files that provided the basic curriculum content. In the Ellsworth case, these local files referenced resources on remote web servers at various points via the usual web hypertext link to illustrate aspects of the curriculum. With the dial-up connection in place, material authored locally and resident on the local classroom computer running the web browser was used in conjunction with material authored by others and resident on remote servers.

The remote material remained on the remote server and was simply accessed in the usual web fashion. The local material resided on the local classroom computer.

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Ellsworth Elementary School - Ellsworth Web

I developed a web offering over several years in collaboration with a number of different Fifth Grade teachers at Ellsworth Elementary School. We used it to teach...

• Art Awareness - this is a curriculum element that is normally taught on a once per month basis by volunteer moms and dads using a curriculum guide and poster reproductions of significant works of art. We taught it this time by using the web to show the works of art.
  • For more details, see A Note About Doing Art Awareness via Local Files and Web Resources.
  • For feedback, see Art Awareness Student Goal Setting and Evaluation.
    
• Water Resource Awareness - A while back in Naperville we had a flood. Later, in the same style as the Art Awareness unit, developing local resources and linking to remote resources, we did a unit on water resources and water utilization. I provide a link to the main remote resource we used (which just happened to be associated with my elementary school, Ivywild, in Colorado Springs, Colorado). I also show one of the local resources. I will update this later with a more complete description of the unit, the lesson plan, etc.

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Washington Junior High School - Washington Wide Web

I did both web-based activities and non-web (but computer-based) activities.

• I developed a local offline web site at the Washington Junior High LRC. This was done in collaboration with the Learning Resources Director and LRC staff several years ago before the school had a network connection and before all the necessary permissions for student access to the web had been worked out. It let us provide a "simulated" web site on the existing LRC file server simultaneously accessible via a standard browser from any of the thirty LRC computers. We did this at no out-of-pocket cost. One notable curriculum application is described here.
  
• I taught "perl," a computer language that is free, flexible, and multi-platform (PC, Mac, and Unix) to the middle school computer club in collaboration with the LRC Director and the Computer Club advisor. A short evaluation of the effort and the six handouts I wrote for the sessions are posted here. I wrote them from a language arts perspective, since "perl" is rather natural-language-like in its allowing multiple ways of expressing things and since the students by this point in their schooling have had a lot of lessons in language arts.

David J. Ritchie
Naperville, Illinois

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hits since 1998/07/01.