UsingWebsites

WiselyOnline resources can deepen

student learning-if teachers designthe right tasks and learner supports.

I Julie Coiro and Jay Fogleman

N ot all informational

websites are createdequal. They range fromstatic representationsof content with few

opportunities for interaction or supportto dynamic, multimodal representa-tions of concepts embedded withina pedagogically sound learning envi-ronment (Coiro & Fogleman, 2009). Ifused strategically, web-based learningenvironments can serve as tools formotivating, instructing, and assessinglearners (Wijekumar, 2005). Theycan also facilitate peer interaction andextend thinking in a particular domain(Sadik, 2004).

We focus on three types of web-based learning environments here-informational reading systems,interactive learning systems, andinstructional learning systems-framingour thinking about effective lessondesign in terms of two crucial questions:What do you want your students to

understand and be able to do? and Howcan web-based learning environmentssupport your learning goals?

What Do You WantYour Students to Understandand Be Able to Do?The first step in designing a lesson planthat includes a web-based learningenvironment is to clarify your learninggoals. You might reflect on the followingwith a colleague: What are the big ideasin your lesson or unit? What commonstudent misunderstandings might youexpect? What key knowledge and skillswill students acquire, and how will stu-dents demonstrate achievement of yourdesired results? Clarifying how studentswill demonstrate their understanding ofyour goals before you begin exploringwebsites will help you target (or dis-regard) particular websites.

The next step is to reflect on theefficacy of the methods and materialsyou typically use to teach this lesson.

Which concepts are most challenging,and what types of learning scaffoldswould enhance your instruction tobetter support students in demon-strating your desired results? In a mathlesson about calculating the slope ofa line, for example, do your materialsrepresent algebraic concepts in multipleways for learners who are more visual orauditory? Do students ever fail to graspthe ways that calculating the slope ofa line might actually help them in thereal world? Could parts of this lessonbe more engaging in ways that enablestudents to manipulate and applymathematical concepts in the contextof real-life situations (as opposed to aseries of equations listed on a textbookpage)? Would students understandthese concepts more deeply if they wererepresented in a different format-using images, video, animation, orsimulations?

A clear understanding of how youmight improve your lesson can inform

34 EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP / FEBRUARY 2011

your selection of offerings from par-ticular websites. In this way, you canengage students in meaningful onlinework and help them achieve yourlearning goals.

How Can Informational WebsitesSupport Your Learning Goals?A review of popular informationalwebsites (Coiro & Fogleman, 2009)revealed at least three types of web-based environments that differ inpurpose, types of multimodality andinteractivity, and levels of instructionalsupport (see "Using Websites to Learn,"p. 37). These differences have conse-quences for how a website may or maynot support your needs.

Web-Based InformationalReading SystemsWhat They Look Like. Educationalwebsites in the informational cat-egory often entice interested readerswith engaging content, but they don'tnecessarily provide scaffolding forstudents or teachers in how to useor learn from the information. Suchwebsites present content-area con-cepts in primarily static, text-basedenvironments, although some contentmay also be represented with clip art,

photographs, or videos.Typically, readers navigatethrough the site guided onlyby their interest in or needto obtain information; fewopportunities are available tointeract with concepts otherthan by reading or viewinginformation.

For example, Discover(http://discovermagazine.com) features a lively col-lection of news articles aboutscience, technology, and thefuture. The main menu linksreaders to multiple mediasources, including short

videos, photo galleries, and weeklypodcasts that present science conceptsin multiple formats. Within the articles,authors summarize research whilepresenting science issues as interestingtopics to explore. However, the websiteis designed primarily to attract adultreaders and science enthusiasts and toencourage people to subscribe to theprint version of Discover magazine. Con-sequently, there are no explicit connec-tions to education standards or lessonplans and no tips for how to navigate oruse the website in a classroom context.

Awesome Stories (www.awesomestories.com) features a collection ofmultimedia primary source materials-for example, photos, video, audio, andhistorical documents-held togetherin a series of digital stories about films,famous trials, disasters, and historicalevents. A visit to one section about theHolocaust, for example, contains textembedded with hyperlinks that lead toa time line of important World War IIevents, a map of Poland, photos ofpolitical prisoners, and a virtual realitymovie depicting the Auschwitz concen-tration camp. These multiple represen-tations help learners grasp informationin a variety of ways. But this websiteoffers little guidance in how to help

students navigate the stories or interpretthe primary sources in ways that fosterdeep learning. The site offers lessonplans connected to some of the digitalstories' themes and plans to add 70more lesson plans "soon," which mayaddress this issue.

How to Use Them. One strategy fordesigning lessons around websites thatoffer a wide range of information butlittle instructional support is to designa task that is focused on a small set ofreadings within the website and thataligns with your learning goals, offersreading choices, and scaffolds students'understanding of important connectionsacross the texts.

For example, a teacher who selectsthe Awesome Stories resource about theHolocaust (www.awesomestories.com/history/auschwitz) might include thedigital story as part of a lesson designedto increase students' understandingof the terrible ways in which peoplesuffered during World War II. After aguided introduction discussing howdifferent types of embedded media canoffer additional insights not revealedin text, the teacher might give the fol-lowing assignment:

"* Read the digital story."* Select four primary sources across

several types of representations (forexample, three photos and an audioclip) that most influenced your under-standing of what it was like to be heldprisoner at the Auschwitz concentrationcamp.

n Identify at least three ways peoplesuffered in the camp, using evidencefrom the digital story and your selectedprimary sources.

Teachers can design a similar activityfor students as they read an article atthe Discover magazine website. The 20Things You Didn't Know About...series (http://discovermagazine.com/columns/20-things-you-didnt-know)offers an opportunity to focus students'

ASCD / WWW.ASCD.ORG 35

attention on a specific science topic (forexample, fuel, water, viruses, or time)that the teacher aligns with an essentialquestion.

For example, in a class studying therole that water plays in biology or earthsystems, one essential question mightbe, Why is water essential to all life?As part of this unit, pairs of studentsstudying the water cycle might inves-tigate one of the facts from "20 ThingsYou Didn't Know About... Water"and report their findings to the class. Byconnecting to a popular science source,

you can "reconnect" the water cycle torelated topics outside the classroom andbroaden students' knowledge beyondmore traditional explanations.

Intentionally designed support activ-ities such as these can transform web-based reading systems into powerfullearning tools that offer students a widerange of reading materials related to atopic and guide their understandingof important disciplinary connectionsacross multiple texts.

Web-Based InteractiveLearning SystemsWhat They Look Like. Educational web-sites in the interactive category movebeyond static and multimodal infor-mational features to include interactiverepresentations of content that enablestudents to more actively engage withkey concepts. These are often part ofa menu of educational features-forexample, lesson plans, quizzes, videocollections, or games-that are isolatedfrom the reading portions of the websitebut offer students or teachers low tomoderate levels of instructional support.This support might indicate how a gameconnects to an education standard oroffer directions for how to engage with

an activity. Typically, the information isrelated to a particular topic or discipline(for example, science, math, or history);but few explicit connections betweenfeatures help learners (or teachers)connect one informational element toanother in meaningful ways.

For example, Science News forKids (www.sciencenewsforkids.org)is a web-based interactive learningsystem devoted to science news forchildren ages 9-14. The site features anArticle Archive with static informationthat resembles offerings in the web-

based informational reading systems.However, this archive sits alongside amenu of more interactive selections thatactively engage students with sciencecontent.

For example, in the GameZoneportion of the website, students can playvarious strategy games, such as SlimeVolleyball, sudoku, and Traffic Jam. InLabZone, they can follow directions toconduct experiments, such as measuringthe effect of temperature on the rate ofa chemical reaction (using Alka-Seltzer)or investigating what happens to layersof water with different densities. InSciFairZone, they can find tips for cre-ating successful science fair projects andexamples of winning projects.

Elsewhere, students can post ques-tions about science news topics andinteract with others. The TeacherZonefeatures instructional supports forteachers, including an annotated list ofscience websites to explore as well asquestion sheets intended to spark stu-dents' thinking before, during, and afterreading articles in the archive. Finally,SciFiZone offers suggestions for howand why to integrate science fictionstories into science lessons.

Fact Monster (www.factmonster

.com) is set up in a similar fashion butis designed to support learning thatcuts across a range of content areas.Students can access reference material(an encyclopedia, a dictionary, anatlas, and several almanacs) as well as adigital information archive categorizedby such topics as science, math, sports,and people. In a separate section, inter-active games, puzzles, word searches,and quizzes provide practice with ele-mentary math and language arts skills.

A key feature that moves this websitefrom a reading system to a learningsystem is the Homework Center,which organizes information bysubject area and connects students tosubject-specific learning tools, such asa conversion calculator and a periodictable. The center links to the Fun Braincompanion website (www.funbrain.com), which offers a CurriculumGuide that lists games by title, subject,and grade level, as well as a searchableStandards Finder. A teacher can select atopic-math, for instance-and a gradelevel-say, 2nd grade-and find a list ofstandards, several of which have gamesassociated with them. For example,the standard "Uses trial and error andthe process of elimination to solveproblems" is associated with almost twodozen games that students can play.Thus, teachers can select specific onlineexperiences for their students thatmatch their desired learning results.

How to Use Them. One strategy fordesigning lessons that capitalize on thebreadth of content offered on these sitesis to encourage students to select a topicof interest on the site and decide howthey will learn more about that topic.This task also addresses the CommonCore English Language Arts Standards(Common Core Standards Initiative,2010), which stipulate that all studentsshould be able to independently andproficiently read a range of complexinformational texts at their grade level inhistory, social studies, and science.

A teacher might, for example, presentyounger students with an independentreading guide for the Science News

36 EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP / FEBRUARY 2011

Teachers can select specific online

experiences for their students that match

their desired learning results.

for Kids website in the form of a bingoboard of reading activities and follow-upquestions (see www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed lead/el_201102_reading-bingo.pdf. The teacher might use thisparticular reading guide to foster inde-pendent reading during a 4th gradescience unit on fossils. In this case, theteacher would direct students to theDinosaurs and Fossils tab in the articlearchive; once there, students would find52 articles from which they would selectany two articles of interest to read.

They might, for example, readabout the bug that may have killedthe Tyrannosaurus Rex, the fossil-richtar pits of Venezuela, or the theoryabout what three things wiped outwoolly mammoths. Then students canuse the remaining two spaces on thebingo board to explore other sciencetopics embedded in the PuzzleZone orLabZone sections of the website. Foreach activity they engage in, studentswrite the title of their activity in theappropriate box on the board and userelevant questions at the bottom ofthe reading guide to summarize whatthey learned during their explorations.Finally, at the end of the week, studentsexchange new ideas about fossils andother science topics with their peers.A teacher might design a similar open-ended activity board to match theselections at Fact Monster or at one ofthe many other web-based interactivelearning systems.

When students have some controlover choosing what they read (or inthis case, interact with), they showmore interest in their reading (Guthrie,2008). In addition, features that linkreadings and activities to curriculum-based standards help teachers ensurethat students are interacting with topicsthat align with grade-level themes andexpectations.

Web-Based InstructionalLearning SystemsWhat They Look Like. This type of edu-cational website is an instructionallearning system for learners as opposed

Using Websites to LearnCheck out the following websites, which range from solid informational systemsfor readers to dynamic instructional systems for learners.

Web-Based Informational Reading Systems

n Awesome Stores (www.awesomestories.com)

m Discover Magazine (www.discovermagazine.com) and 20 Things You Didn'tKnow About... (http://discovermagazine.comn/coumns/20-things-you-didnt-know)

a Math in Daily Life (www.leamer.org/interactives/dailymath)

m The History Place (www.historyplace.corn)

Web-Based nteractive Learning Systems

n Science News for Kids (www.sciencenewsforkids.org)

a FactMonster(www.factmonster.com)

a OLogy (www.amnh.org/ology),from the American Museum ofNatural History

n Cells Alive (www.cellsalive.com)

a America By Air: SmithsonianNational Air and Space Museum(www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gall 02/americabyairfindex.cfm)

a The Big Myth: A Study of WorldCreation Myths (http:/lmythicjourneys.org/bigmyth/ndex.htm)

a BBC History: Interactives, Games, and Virtual Tours (www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive)

a Windows to the Universe (ww.vwindows2universe-org), from the National EarthScience Teachers Association

s National Geographic Creature Feature (http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/animals/creaturefeature)

Web-Based Instructional Learning Systems

a National Library of Virtual Manipulatives (http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vlibrary.html)

w Google Lit Trips (www.googlelittrips.org)

a Knowing Edgar Allan Poe (http://knowingpoe.thinkport.org)

w Sense and Dollars: Think You Know About Money? (http:/senseanddollars.thinkportorg)

a Pathways to Freedom: Maryland and the Underground Railroad (http://pathways.thinkport.org/flash-home.cfm)

m On the Trail of Captain John Smith (http//kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/gamesfinteractiveadventures/john-smith)

ASCD/ WWW.ASCD.ORG 37

to an informational system for readers.In these environments, content is notonly represented within multimodaland interactive features that studentscan respond to and control, but it is alsoembedded in an instructional interfacedesigned to connect the activities invirtual simulations (for example, avirtual museum or virtual experiment).This environment often opens up in aseparate Flash-animated interface thatincludes suggestions for how to use thewebsite in an education setting and howto align student activities with specificstate or national learning standards.

For example, the National Library ofVirtual Manipulatives (http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vlibrary.html) is a digitallibrary that contains Java applets formore than 120 activities that are alignedto areas of K-12 mathematics and aretranslated into four languages (English,Spanish, French, and Chinese). Eachtool includes a set of instructions, linksto national mathematics standards,suggested learning prompts that frameits use in a real-life application, and aparent-teacher component that explainshow using the tool enhances learningand understanding.

To illustrate, let's look at AlgebraTiles, a virtual manipulative for stu-dents in grades 6-8. The digital toolappears in the center of the window;learners select an item from the topmenu (Activities, Parent/Teacher, Stan-dards, or Instructions) to reveal thecorresponding text in the right frame.For example, one activity asks users to"fill in the horizontal and vertical axesto show that 4x + 2y = 2(2x + y)." Stu-dents and teachers can virtually explorethe properties and functions of differentalgebraic concepts, seek support whenneeded, and view learning purposes.

Google Lit Trips (www.googlelittrips.org) is a collection of virtual literarytrips embedded in Google Earth, a geo-graphic information program. Whenreaders download a Lit Trip from thelesson database, they can follow the plotand characters of a given book throughthose areas of the globe that serve as thebook's setting. For example, youngerstudents who are reading RobertMcCloskey's Make Way for Ducklingscan take a virtual trip through Boston;students in grades 6-8 who are readingLaurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793 canvirtually explore Philadelphia; and stu-

dents in grades 9-12 who are readingKhaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner canvirtually travel the difficult terrain ofAfghanistan. During their journey, stu-dents view photographs, read excerptsfrom the book, answer questions, makeconnections between the book and thereal world, and explore links to supple-mental information about particularlocations and landmarks.

How to Use Them. When designinglessons to accompany websites in thiscategory, it's important to help studentsrecognize the connection between thesevirtual experiences and the conceptsyou cover in class. For example, after alesson in which students use the AlgebraTiles virtual manipulative to multiplyspecific binomials, reserve time to helpstudents appreciate the value of such atool on two levels. First, the interactivenature of this tool enables students toactively construct a more concrete rep-resentation of how to group multipleunknown variables and model theiruse in problem situations, as opposedto just performing the calculations on agiven example in a math book. Second,the open-ended nature of the toolenables students to change the value of

x and y and instantly view how thesechanges influence the various parts ofthe equation. Reflecting with studentsabout how these tools can enhance theirunderstanding of challenging conceptsin your curriculum may encourage themto seek out other web-based instruc-tional systems.

Working Meaningfully OnlineAlthough the task of integrating onlineinformation sources with curriculargoals may seem daunting, teachers canrefine their time-tested strategies forintegrating offline resources to useonline resources in ways that engagestudents and deepen their under-standing. By concentrating on keylearning goals and performance-basedskills, teachers can design tasks andsupports that make students' onlinework meaningful and worthwhile. M

ReferencesCoiro, J., & Fogleman, J. (2009, April).

A conceptual analysis of how multimodalcontent-area websites align with emergingtheories of new literacies and technology usein schools classrooms. Paper presented inBridging new literacies and technologicalpedagogical content knowledge (TPCK):Theoretical and research perspectivessymposium at the annual meeting of theAmerican Educational Research Asso-ciation, San Diego, CA.

Common Core Standards Initiative. (2010).Common core standards for English languagearts grades K-12. Retrieved from www.corestandards.org/the-standards/english-language-arts-standards

Guthrie, J. T. (Ed.). (2008). Engaging ado-lescents in reading. Thousand Oaks, CA:Corwin Press.

Sadik, A. (2004). The design elements ofweb-based learning environments. Inter-national Journal of Instructional Technologyand Distance Learning, 1(8), 27-44.

Wijekumar, K. (2005). Creating effectiveweb-based learning environments: Rel-evant research and practice. Innovate,1(5). Retrieved from www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=26

Julie Coiro (jcoiro@mail.uri.edu) andJay Fogleman (fogleman@mail.uri.edu)are assistant professors in the Schoolof Education at the University of RhodeIsland, Kingston.

38 EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP / FEBRUARY 2011

Teachers can use online resourcesin ways that engage students

and deepen understanding.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Author:

Title:

Source:

ISSN:

Publisher:

Coiro, Julie; Fogleman, Jay

Using Websites Wisely

Educ Leadership 68 no5 F 2011 p. 34-8

0013-1784

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

1703 N. Beauregard St., Alexandria, VA 22314-1403

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproducedwith permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright isprohibited.

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub- licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.