A little background first: As a concluding project to studying the "Progressive Era" in American History, our 8th graders have to give a class presentation about a National Park of their choice. This is a "role playing" project which has them take on the persona of a park ranger who must give a presentation to a congressional over-site committee. The goal of the presentation is to convince committee members to not de-fund or close their park. Here's a link to the project site if your interested. As an aside, I like this project, in part, because a component of the rubric has them contacting an actual NP Ranger. Most students just want to email, but a majority wind up having to make a phone call and talk to a live Ranger. We've got to work on our people skills along side the digital ones!
In the process of doing research on their national parks, I was teaching them how to use the filetype: operator in Google to search for KMZ files when low and behold the top entry for a Shenandoah National Park search was from our school wiki page.
In the process of doing research on their national parks, I was teaching them how to use the filetype: operator in Google to search for KMZ files when low and behold the top entry for a Shenandoah National Park search was from our school wiki page.
The lesson my wide-eyed students took away from this was that their work, which gets posted online, is important. It's not important because they are getting a grade, or because it's for a presentation they will have to give in front of an actual audience, but rather because their work is digitally permanent.
It was neat to see their reactions when I told them that file was uploaded back in 2008...an eternity ago for a middle schooler! If the work which a student did almost four years ago is coming up in the search results now, what might happen to the work they post today?
The answer to that question has all sorts of implications, many of which I won't get into here, but the most obvious one is of quality. All of the sudden knowing that someone from the future will use their work all of the sudden ups the ante on their effort.
Never discount the power of audience, either now...or in future!
If you're interested, here is a list of helpful search links and/or sites:
It was neat to see their reactions when I told them that file was uploaded back in 2008...an eternity ago for a middle schooler! If the work which a student did almost four years ago is coming up in the search results now, what might happen to the work they post today?
The answer to that question has all sorts of implications, many of which I won't get into here, but the most obvious one is of quality. All of the sudden knowing that someone from the future will use their work all of the sudden ups the ante on their effort.
Never discount the power of audience, either now...or in future!
If you're interested, here is a list of helpful search links and/or sites:
- Google Search Operators--http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html
- My Diigo sites about Search--
http://www.diigo.com/user/rjacklin/search - Power Searching with Google--
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/landing/powersearching.html
2 comments:
Kudos to you and your students for this learning moment and for ranking in the search results!
It reminded me of similar circumstances around a couple of YouTube videos our students created and posted about 5 years ago. At that time we had a discussion about all the things we could publish on the web and decided to do a project to share the Gospel message. The kids scripted, designed sets and puppets and recorded videos titled The True Christmas Story and The True Easter Story.
These videos live on today and have 40,345 and 15,746 views respectively. Each year I show the videos to the middle schoolers, and they are in awe of the reach of the videos!
Blessings!
Thanks for the comment Sallie. The best part about using the web are the times when you get surprised! These digital surprises make for great conversation starters with students, especially as they consider the impact they can have on a person's faith/life journey. Those resources are not only for us, but for people we may never see or know! How exciting! Like your videos, you can share the Gospel with people who are yet to be born.
Thanks again!
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