Today\u27s students watch the newest movie trailers on the Web, share music files, play video games with other players over the Internet, and swap digital pictures of the latest teen idols. Donald Tapscott points out in his book Growing Up Digital that as this rich multimedia experience becomes more a part of students\u27 lives outside of school, they will further expect this kind of experience in school as well

Hofer, Mark J.

English

College of William & Mary: W&M Publish

W&M ScholarWorks Articles 2004 Online Digital Archives Technology That Supports Rich, Student-Centered Learning Experiences Mark J. Hofer College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/articles  Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Hofer, Mark J., "Online Digital Archives Technology That Supports Rich, Student-Centered Learning Experiences" (2004). Articles. 32. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/articles/32 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@wm.edu. Learning & Leading with Technology  Volume 32   Number 26FeatureTechnology That Supports Rich, Student-Centered Learning ExperiencesBy Mark HoferOnlineSubject: Access, inquiry-based activities, student-centered learningGrades: K–12 (Ages 5–18)Standards: NETS•S 3, 5, 6; NETS•T II (http://www.iste.org/standards/)Digital ArchivesCopyright © ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), iste@iste.org. All rights reserved.                                                                                                                                       October  2004  Learning & Leading with Technology 7FeatureToday’s students watch the newest movie trailers on the Web, share music fi les, play video games with other players over the Internet, and swap digital pictures of the latest teen idols. Donald Tap-scott points out in his book Growing Up Digital that as this rich multime-dia experience becomes more a part of students’ lives outside of school, they will further expect this kind of experi-ence in school as well. A student’s in-school experience with media is often quite different than in their personal lives. Despite increased technology access and student-centered and constructivist activities, the typical classroom often still emphasizes text and audio chan-nels to transmit knowledge. Although it may be diffi cult for a fi fth grade teacher to compete with MTV and The Lord of the Rings movies, teach-ers can leverage the rich multimedia resources accessible on the Web to support meaningful, content-based instructional activities by using online digital archives.A digital archive is a Web-based collection of a wide variety of digital media focused around a common topic. The best digital archives do more than provide a collection of links to different resources on a topic; rather, a true archive houses all the materials on one Web server, helping ensure that materials referenced are well organized and available. Many digital archives are hosted by universi-ties or government agencies, increas-ing both the likelihood that the site will be functional and the probability that materials have been screened by experts to increase their validity.The topics can be either very spe-cifi c (The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi) or quite broad (animals). A common feature to many digital archives is their inclusion of a wide variety of media types to provide multiple representation of the topic at hand. For example, a single archive might include text fi les, images, video, sound, animation, and other types of materials to provide a diverse, rich learning environment. Descriptions of the following archives provide a glimpse into the classroom potential of this rich resource. (Editor’s note: Find URLs under Resources on p. 11.)Digital Archives in the ClassroomAlthough Web archives are undoubt-edly great resources, merely having access to these rich collections of materials is only the beginning. For digital archives to effectively support teaching and learning, activities must be structured in a way to leverage the potential of these resources in ways that are meaningful for students while addressing worthwhile content standards at the same time. Although these resources could be used in instruction in numerous ways, the following examples focus on student-centered activities in which students explore the archives to create their own understanding of the topic at hand.Reactions to September 11, 2001. Perhaps one of the richest and most complete digital archives currently available on the Web is the September 11 Digital Archive. Created to “col-lect, preserve, and present the history of the September 11, 2001, attacks,” the 9/11 archive provides a vast array of materials to explore the tragedy in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virgin-ia. Upon visiting the site, the visitor has the option to explore the events of and reactions to 9/11 in a variety of media formats including still and moving images, sound fi les (fi rsthand accounts and music), and a forum to read and contribute personal refl ec-tions on the events. Because of the sensitive and emotional nature of the subject, you should preview the ma-terials included in the archive. In par-ticular, some of the images are graphic and the satirical animations may be offensive to some viewers.A quick exploration of the site yields examples of children’s artwork of how they depict the events, satiri-cal animations of Osama bin Laden, countless images of the twin tow-ers and the devastation that ensued, and a letter from a father to his six-month-old daughter describing the events he and his family experienced. You will fi nd excellent images and poems to use as writing prompts in language arts classes. You could also challenge students to create a “found” or recycled poem using words and The September 11 Digital Archive allows students to see and hear the accounts of those involved in the  2001 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.The best digital archives do more than provide a collection of links to different resources on a topic; rather, a true archive houses all the materials on one Web server, helping ensure that materials referenced are well organized and available.Copyright © ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), iste@iste.org. All rights reserved.FeatureLearning & Leading with Technology  Volume 32   Number 28payload bay, and a behind-the-scenes look at the shuttle Discovery’s recent overhaul bring the space program to life. You can lead students through the development and execution of the MESSENGER mission to Mercury.  Students can follow, in real time, the progress of the mission, submit ques-tions to the crew at mission control, and build a printable model to build a 3-D version of the spacecraft.Archimedes and Complex Mathemati-cal Topics. The wide variety of materi-als available in digital archives opens up many instructional opportunities for the classroom teacher. A diffi cult concept for many students to under-stand in mathematics is how math-ematical principles and discoveries can be applied in the real world, and how some of these discoveries have literally changed the world. Teachers often attempt to address this problem by having their students research fa-mous mathematicians and the impact of their work. The Archimedes digital archive housed at Drexel University provides students with a wide array of images, texts, animations, and even sounds to see how his many inventions and ideas changed the ancient world.In this site, students can explore animations that demonstrate the Law of the Lever and the displacement of water. Students can also explore phrases found in the letters, poems, and essays found in the archive to convey their feelings about the 9/11tragedy.  Space Science. The National Aeronau-tic and Space Administration (NASA) has compiled and posted a tremen-dous amount of resources related to the space program and outer space in general. A visit to the site brings bil-lions of dollars worth of research and exploration to your fi ngertips. Under the multimedia heading are links to more than 300,000 carefully in-dexed, high-resolution images, video clips, an art gallery, and interactive multimedia, including a solar system simulator. A detailed history of the space program, including all the missions, provides mission background and objectives, astronaut biographies, re-sults and fi ndings from the missions, and many sound clips, including an extensive collection from the Apollo lunar missions. Items including an exploration of food and nutrition in space, an interactive tour of the space shuttle’s crew compartment and Archimedes’ many war machines, in-cluding the Iron Claw and the Burn-ing Mirror. Finally, detailed images and descriptions can be found on his development of “pi” and the Egyp-tian Screw, which is used to pump water from one place to another. The multiple ways complex topics are rep-resented along with the hyperlinks be-tween connected concepts and ideas help students understand Archimedes’ achievements in a more holistic way than would be possible in static ac-counts or descriptions. One activity to use the Archimedes archive in the high school classroom is to challenge students to design a presentation on why Archimedes should be inducted into the newly created Mathemati-cians Hall of Fame. Students should focus on how his achievements have changed our world. By identifying specifi c ideas and contributions and creating a rationale for why they were so infl uential, students will have a better understanding of both Archi-medes’s accomplishments and how mathematical principles affect society.Inquiry and the Civil War. Re-cently, local and national standards are placing an increasing emphasis on higher-order thinking skills. Student-centered inquiry projects, in particular, are emphasized in national standards, including the National Standards for History and the National Science Education Stan-dards. In these activities, students are challenged to ask a question centered on a topic, design their own proce-dure to gather and analyze informa-tion, and reach a conclusion ground-ed in the evidence they found. Although many classroom teach-ers see the value of this type of learn-ing experience, a true inquiry activity can be diffi cult to implement in the classroom because of the limited re-sources of school libraries and the often-ineffi cient process of indepen-dent student Internet research. Digi-Web sites, such as this one about Archime-des, can help students see the relevance of ancient thinkers in the modern world.The NASA Web site contains rich materials to help you bring real-world science into the classroom.The wide variety of materials available in digital archives opens up many instructional opportunities for the classroom teacher.Copyright © ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), iste@iste.org. All rights reserved.FeatureLearning & Leading with Technology  Volume 32   Number 210The diversity and depth of existing digital archives available on the Web provide opportunities for student investigations in all grade levels and content areas.lar topic. The digital format of these materials allows students to easily incorporate them into a variety of for-mats for presentation, including word processing documents, multimedia presentation, Web pages, and digi-tal video creation/editing software. An increasingly popular application of digital materials for students to demonstrate their understanding of a topic is through digital storytelling. The Center for Digital Storytelling is an excellent resource for guiding students and others interested in de-veloping digital stories. The Digital Storytelling Cookbook included on the site is a helpful guide in structur-ing the story creation process. A visit to the Animals archive from the Sea World digital archive presents students with a wealth of information on animals, including text, images, video clips and sounds. Although a scavenger hunt of some kind will as-sist students in exploring the archive, by challenging students to use the resources included on the site to con-struct a story of an animal’s life or ad-ventures provides a more motivating and dynamic learning experience than merely a hunt for facts. For example, tal archives can provide a collection of resources in one place to support an authentic investigation activity.The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War project, created and hosted by the University of Virginia’s Center for Digital History, is a rich col-lection of primary source materials from the U.S. Civil War. The archive focuses on the experience of two communities in the war (Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia) and provides access to thousands of pages of diaries, let-ters, newspaper articles, government documents, pictures, maps, census and tax records, and a variety of other offi cial records from 1859–1870. An interactive battle map allows users to visually track the progress of a variety of individual units throughout the war, while viewing or hiding several geographic details such as rivers or current roads and highways.The collection can be browsed or searched in a variety of ways through either a graphical or text-based in-terface. The collection and organiza-tion of resources in the Valley of the Shadow project support students in conducting historical inquiry investi-gations in much the same manner as historians would. As the Web Inquiry Project activity The Civil War and the American Family illustrates, this rich collection of documents can enable students to ask and answer sophisti-cated, student-generated questions about what life was like for a typical family in the Civil War. In this activ-ity, students are guided through the process of asking specifi c questions about a letter from Thomas Garber to his sister Addie in 1862. This initial activity can lead into an activ-ity in which students ask their own questions about life during the Civil War. Using the database of letters and diaries to help fi nd answers to their questions, the activity could encour-age students to explore a specifi c set of resources or topics within the database or be more open-ended. Stu-dents might be asked to create a set of diary entries from the perspective of a person whose experience is captured in the materials or create their own newspaper chronicling a topic found in the database, drawing from histori-cal resources rather than just on in-formation found in the textbook. The diversity and depth of existing digital archives available on the Web provide opportunities for student investigations in all grade levels and content areas. Constructing Meaning through Digital Storytelling. Another excit-ing possibility with digital archives is the potential for students to select archive elements and produce their own presentations to illustrate their understanding of a particular curricu-This interactive battle map at the Valley of the Shadow Web site shows the movement of specifi c troops and battle sites.The Sea World Web site is a source of information about many different animals, including the killer whales for which the theme park is famous.Although many classroom teachers see the value of inquiry-based learning experiences, a true inquiry activity can be diffi cult to implement in the classroom because of the limited resources of school libraries and the often-ineffi cient process of independent student Internet research.Copyright © ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), iste@iste.org. All rights reserved.Feature                                                                                                                                       October  2004  Learning & Leading with Technology 11by copying and pasting relevant elements from the archive into a PowerPoint presentation, students can either add text captions or record a voice narration of the story to tie the artifacts together to tell a story. In the end, students have created a dynamic presentation that they can share with their classmates and par-ents, demonstrating a multifaceted understanding of their chosen animal.Considerations and Closing ThoughtsAlthough the potential of using online digital archives to support teaching and learning is consider-able, there are concerns to consider. Chief among these are bandwidth limitations and copyright and fair use issues. A practical limitation in using digital archives can be the limitations of the school’s Internet connection. To download some of the rich im-age, video, and audio fi les available in many digital archives requires a high bandwidth connection, particu-larly when students are exploring an archive on several computers simul-taneously, such as in a computer lab. For the experience to be effective in a computer lab, students will need to be able to simultaneously access large resources. If the network connection cannot support this, perhaps using one computer as a station in the class-room might be a better approach.Another signifi cant concern re-gards copyright and fair use of ma-terials posted on the Web. Contrary to what students and some teachers might believe, just because something is posted on the Web does not mean it is free for others to use. Fortunately, the U.S. Copyright Act considers the special needs and considerations of teachers and students. The Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multime-dia provides certain guidelines under which teachers and students can legal-ly use copyrighted materials in class projects. Before making student work using copyrighted materials (particu-larly posting projects on the Web), it would be wise to explore copyright issues in more depth.Although the bandwidth limita-tions and concern over fair use of copyrighted materials are factors to consider, the potential of online digi-tal archives to support and facilitate a wide variety of student-centered activities make this opportunity dif-fi cult to pass up. As more archives surface, the opportunities and poten-tial to reach and engage the Digital Generation will also increase.ResourcesArchimedes: http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/contents.htmlCenter for Digital Storytelling: http://www.storycenter.org/The Civil War and the American Family: http://edWeb.sdsu.edu/wip/examples/garber/student.htmNASA Web site: http://www.nasa.gov/home/Sea World: http://www.seaworld.org/September 11 Digital Archive: http://911digitalarchive.orgU.S. Copyright Offi ce: http://www.copyright.govValley of the Shadow—Two Communities in the American Civil War: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/govdoc/search_images.htmlMark Hofer is an assistant professor in instructional technology in the Towson University College of Educa-tion and a former high school social studies teacher. He is currently working on projects to use digital primary source historical material in K–12 classrooms, and employ images and video in the creation of digital stories. He also focuses on innovative ways to prepare preservice teach-ers to transform teaching and learning with the appropriate use of technology.Contrary to what students and some teachers might believe, just because something is posted on the Web does not mean it is free for others to use. Copyright © ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), iste@iste.org. All rights reserved.

Online Digital Archives Technology That Supports Rich, Student-Centered Learning Experiences

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Online Digital Archives Technology That Supports Rich, Student-Centered Learning Experiences

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