The right balance between giving students freedom to explore the Web for research and providing them with structure and guidance ties back to how students have learned to use the Web in the first place. As we saw with the internet workshops, internet etiquette, safety and privacy are primary concerns when we are letting students loose on the internet to conduct research. When students fully understand that standards have been set up and expectations have been put in place to scaffold them through their online usage, they will capitalize on the online experience to authentically conduct valid research. Students need instruction in the expectations and standards, and instructors need to conduct assessments to ensure that students understand fully. Then, students can be free to use the internet with accountability and responsibility for their own work and actions. This freedom (with clearly defined acceptability parameters) allows students to conduct real research.
The role of the teachers in helping students to make sense of primary source material is to provide students with the tools to know where to look for the primary source material and the tools to make the research meaningful. November (2010) suggests teaching students skills such as “asking important questions, seeking clues, constructing hypotheses and presenting to authentic audiences” (66). Primary source material can be used across the curriculum to support learning or as a learning text itself. Further, November notes, as with any texts, students must be taught to review the material critically to consider bias, perspective and relevance to their research (72). Finally, students should understand that primary source material can be a great starting place that leads to further questions, data analysis and related research queries. Primary source documents present a unique opportunity to examine historical events "in the moment" from a particular perspective that has not been interpreted by textbook writers hundreds of years later. Students may initially struggle with this idea as it is juxtaposed to textbook learning. However, the understanding to be gained from primary source research is rich and meaningful.
Podcasting and other multimedia tools are great technology for teachers to use for students in pair or group work. Podcasts and other media technologies are multi-faceted and require the cooperation of the entire group to successfully complete a task. The technologies require students to make group decisions as to content, format, music, etc. Further, the different aspects of the project make it possible for each group member to play an active and engaged role in the process. As well, the technology is user-friendly and the students can support each other’s learning. Collaboratively, the students will need to break down the steps needed to complete the podcast or screencast, work together to complete the video, screen work , voice work and/or filming. Finally, they will need to edit the final project together. Beyond working on the project itself, the students can share the work with the classroom or beyond. All aspects of these technologies promote collaborative learning and individual and group success. With our own classroom technology collaborations, I have learned from the group effort a greater understanding of the applications of the technology. I understood the intention of the technology from class and the reading, but doing the tasks as a group has considerably influenced my greater understanding.
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