Assignment Number 3 – Multimedia Website

Lisa Hood ()

Paul Leslie ()

Peter Rawsthorne ()

(The Mun-sters)

CapeBretonUniversity

Partial fulfillment of the requirements for EDU537

Dr. Diane Janes

March, 2006

Multimedia Web site address:

Table of Contents

Format of Multimedia Web Site

Constructivism in Web Site

Multiple Intelligences

Lesson Plan

Resources:

References

Sites

Format of Multimedia Web Site

The MUNsters[1] chose a webquest format for this project virtually without discussion as “WebQuests help students go beyond learning basic facts. A WebQuest is "an inquiry activity that presents student groups with a challenging task, provides access to an abundance of online resources and scaffolds the learning process to prompt higher order thinking. The products of WebQuests are usually then put out to the world for some real feedback." These online multimedia activities readily draw upon all of the multiple intelligences learning behaviors.”(Alick, 1999).

The group felt strongly that a constructivist approach to learning suited our pedagogic goal of giving students an experience that reflected a “real” working environment in a meaningful manner. Our definition of a “real” working environment includes being part of a group or team and relying on others to fulfill part of the requirements of the task at hand. It also includes exercising and building on an integrated set of skills that include the ability to communicate coherently through writing and discussion, to manage a budget or at least be aware of budgetary concerns, and to use IT skills. To achieve this goal, the decision was made to create an integrated project involving the core subjects of Social studies, Mathematics, Language Arts and mixed with computer studies.

From this starting point, the decision to design a webquest came quite naturally. A webquest provides an ideal learning environment for the construction of knowledge. One of the main features of webquests is the collection of links and resources that have been previewed and prepared by the teacher. Thus, “students spend their time USING information, not LOOKING for it.” (Disney Learning Partnership, 2004). This is crucial to the constructivist model in that while learning the information literacy skill of judging the quality of materials is important, in the webquest students use these materials to achieve a task, which in turn forces them to access their long term memory to build and add to existing schema. It is important to distinguish that students are not studying or memorizing these materials, but using them.

Constructivism in Web Site

March (1998) notes that, “Built into the Webquest process are the strategies of cognitive psychology and constructivism.” According to schema theory, knowledge is stored in the long term memory in chucks or units called schemata. By giving students integrated tasks and the information they need to complete these tasks, they are better able to construct increasingly complex schema where they can form relational structures between items. As Kirshner (2002) asserts, “a schema may incorporate a huge amount of information. Supporting this comment, Jonassen (1998) states that, “in constructivist environments … learners are actively engaged in interpreting the external world and reflecting on their interpretations.” Through the webquest, students will interact with information from the external world and shape it to serve their needs.

Webquests provide an opportunity for students to engage the real world from the relative safety of the classroom. Mergel (1998) notes that another aspect of constructivist learning is that it presents students with “authentic tasks”. Students work through a series of tasks which create a demand for skills. These skills can then be taught in support for the tasks, which in turn provide a realistic application of the new skills. As March (1998) suggests, “A Webquest forces students to transform information into something else…”.

In the travel webquest, each main task requires the students to draw on a variety of skills in the effort to fulfill the requirements of the task. For example the very first task of budgeting requires brainstorming to discern exactly what expenses they may incur while traveling, investigation of airfares and other expenses, research on destinations and some reasoning to decide where they could afford to go and in what style they wanted to travel. To categorize and organize this information they develop a spreadsheet, which is a mind tool used to represent their understanding of the implications of their budget. As Reeves and Jonassen (1996, p.696) state, “Some of the best thinking results when students try to represent what they know.”

This use of mind tools is seen throughout the webquest, but perhaps most notably in the travel website and blog section, which students must design and maintain throughout their “trip”. As Jonassen (et.al 1998) notes, “designing multimedia presentations is a complex process that engages many skills…”. Again, this task requires students to learn skills of web design, multimedia manipulation and file management and then apply them to a specific task. It is this integration of skills and information that constructs knowledge and creates increasingly more complex schema.

Multiple Intelligences

Multiple intelligence theory is becoming as common a term as pencil in the 21st century classroom. Howard Gardner first proposed this theory in 1983; it was no doubt met with hesitation as teachers considered it to be a fad that would fade. Now, 23 years later, we are still training teachers worldwide to incorporate these intelligences into their teaching.

Gardner’s theory (1983) stated originally that everyone possessed seven intelligences:

  • Logical-Mathematical Intelligence
  • Linguistic Intelligence
  • Spatial Intelligence
  • Kinesthetic Intelligence
  • Musical Intelligence
  • Intrapersonal Intelligence
  • Interpersonal Intelligence

These seven intelligences, when combined allowed students to have better success academically – hence the more of these intelligences a teacher included in a lesson, the better the student was expected to perform. Today, Gardner’s theory is made up of nine intelligences, the seven listed above as well as existential intelligence and naturalist intelligence. An easy way to remember these intelligences is to remember the acronym Skill in Me, (McKenzie, 2005). Each of these letters represents the first letter of one of the nine intelligences.

Multimedia is an excellent resource to include in teaching as it is adaptable to several of the intelligences. Using multimedia such as WebQuests in our teaching is an example of constructivist teaching that allows us to integrate many of the intelligences. WebQuests are an excellent way for students to learn new material and review previously taught material. They make use of the constructivist principles of learning as students are learning by doing – in essence, the student is responsible for their own learning in a WebQuest – what they get out of it depends on what they put into it. “WebQuests are currently the most structured, accessible, and promising application of constructivist thought in the field of online education.” (Martin, 1999). Many people feel that when students are in charge of their learning, they will take more pride in it and work harder. There are also those that feel that just by adding another factor to a child’s learning, i.e. a computer, students will respond differently and be more motivated. (Hung, 2004)

Regardless of a student’s familiarity with a computer, a WebQuest allows all to succeed. Links are given to the student, so they are not left searching aimlessly on the internet for hours looking for the right information. WebQuests are one activity that all students appear to enjoy participating in and also are able to learn from. WebQuests are also one of the few assignments that can be completed in every discipline and in several grades. Due to the push for student success and achievement in school, it is no surprise that more and more teachers are using WebQuests in their teaching.

The WebQuest that the Mun-sters have developed makes use of several of Gardner’s multiple intelligences, including intrapersonal, interpersonal, mathematical, musical, existential, visual/spatial and linguistic. The chart below shows how each of the intelligences fit within each of the assigned student tasks.

Tasks / Budget / Itinerary / Location Chart / Location Research / Cultural Symbols / Media / Web Design & Blog
Intrapersonal
Interpersonal
Mathematical
Visual/Spatial
Kinesthetic
Musical
Existential
Naturalist
Linguistic

Creativity

As a group we created four artifacts for this project. These artifacts include; a comprehensive webquest with the user interface developed in Adobe Flash, a 2000 word paper describing the project, a project companion site that is the repository of all artifacts and journaling created through the project and an example site that brings together the use of free multimedia and journal hosting software. When building all of the artifacts for this project we tried to use rich-media and multimedia where appropriate. This can be seen in our use of color in our Multiple Intelligences table and Rubrics (Bellofatto, 2001), our use of screencasting for the project introduction, our use of flash to build the WebQuest site and our use of free servers to host our example solution.

Flash offers the opportunity to present quantities of information in a manner that allows students to view parts while maintaining a clear idea of where in the site structure they are. As evidenced by the webquest development for this project, Flash allows for a coherent whole to be presented without scrolling and without the audience loosing track of where they are how to get back to the main site. Perhaps the strongest navigational feature in this aspect is the ability to send the audience on a ‘quest’ through the site and allow them to get back to the beginning without a lengthy breadcrumb navigational trail across the top of the page.

The challenge for the webquest was to present the concept map as the basis for the webquest, which is a complex series of interrelated directions and concepts, without leaving the page and without having to reduce the size of the elements to indecipherable bits. This was achieved through the use of frames within the main Flash file, which gave the ability to present different, related text items on the page and then with a click to return to viewing the whole structure of the map. The use of separate files, or screens which, through the functionality of Flash, can be loaded into the main page without leaving the main page allowed the presentation of tasks related to each item of the concept map again, without actually leaving the map. In this manner, the audience never forgets where they are and thus should be able to remain on task much more easily.

Another of the time consuming and creative tasks was in sourcing out existing web sites that could be referenced during the webquest and in finding and creating multimedia elements for our WebQuest. Both these activities require creativity. The sourcing of good web sites requires time and a creative search strategy. The finding and creation of multimedia can be difficult as you must always be aware of copyrights, aesthetics and fit within the theme of your site. If multimedia is not available it will need to be created, and this takes considerable creative energy.

Some people consider the creation of rubrics a creative endeavor. It requires a review of learning objectives combined with the ability to write encouraging benchmark objectives. We feel our Rubrics met this criteria and required creativity to be well integrated with the webquest and its learning objectives.

Copyright and other issues

As we built out the websites that supported our webquest project we needed to address copyright and other issues. The copyright issues need to accommodate for both copyrighted material we consumed and material we created. The other issues we needed to address were; management of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), User Interface (UI) design issues, version management, testing, browser compatibility and the evaluation of multimedia server hosting environments.

When using material from other sites we were always aware of the existing copyrights and followed the required laws. In general, when using others material we link directly to the material and embedded it within our work. We didn’t copy the material into our site and reuse it. This way we used what was made available by the copyright holder and when it was removed from their source it would also be removed from ours. We also in many situations kept a link to the materials source site so it could be accessed directly, therefore honoring the copyright. It was important to our group that the work we did was available through the creative commons (Commons, 2006). As you visit the sites related to this project you will see the creative commons logo on the bottom of some of the web pages. When you click on this logo you will see that we have chosen to use the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 (Commons, 2006) license.

Most of the other issues were within the domain of the SDLC. We needed to be sure we managed the software we were building so all our work remained stable. We also found we needed to agree upon how the web sites were segmented. In particular, we needed to agree what materials were in the webquest site, what materials were in the project site and what materials were in the example solution site. We needed to agree how these three sites were, or were not, interdependent. Having agreed upon processes so we would not overwrite each others work ensured our work stayed stable. It was important that we all tested the sites as we would all have different user habits and this would expose a greater number of the inconsistencies. Once inconsistencies (or bugs) were found they would be forwarded to the person responsible for the module. We were fortunate as we already had a web site hosting environment for our webquest and project sites. When it came time to build an example solution we wanted to stay true to our webquest and we needed to utilize freely available hosting environments. The evaluation of multimedia server hosting environments was a time consuming task, though the issue of deciding on the servers never had a negative impact on any of the projects web sites.

Lesson Plan

Audience:

  • Grade 12 Social Sciences

Authors:

  • Lisa Hood (), Paul Leslie (), Peter Rawsthorne ()

Purpose/thesis:

  • To demonstrate the ability to use a variety of skills in a collaborative environment to develop and execute a complex task.

Credit for lesson idea:

  • Please see reference section

Outcomes/Objectives:

  • Upon completion of this webquest students will have built a full travel itinerary with references to culture, religion, significant landmarks, diet, dress, costs, technical infrastructure and feelings gathered from the country.
  • They will also have created a significant piece of journalistic and social studies work.

Proposed evaluation of web site effectiveness:

  • The website will undergo a formative assessment through a trial implementation with a selected group of students. This will follow a learner focused formative evaluation as discussed by Mann (2006) and based on work by Dick and Carey (2005) and Alessi and Trollop (2001).

Background to lesson:

  • Students will need to have completed prerequisite courses in Geography, Social Studies, Math and Computer Science at the grades 10 and 11 level to be properly prepared for to complete the web quest.

Tasks:

  • Gather information about culture, music, food and historic landmarks (particularly religious temples). The information gathered should include;
  1. Data about the ethnic background of the nation you are visiting
  2. Recordings (MP3) of the local music. Obtain music scores if possible.
  3. Primary diet of local population. Try and get some menus from local restaurants.
  4. Data about the religious beliefs of the nation
  5. Take photographs of religious landmarks (if possible attend ceremonies)
  6. Create and maintain travel blog, upload photographs and sound files
  7. Travel blog should have daily entries that consistently describe the sights, sounds, smells, weather, costs, feelings of your day. (if you can’t get to a web café one day, keep a written journal for later entry in your blog)
  8. Take photographs of each day with focus on travel, sights of significance and religious temples. Organize and reference these photos on flikr.com
  9. Record sounds or get your hands of local music you can rip onto your computer. Upload these files. Organize and reference these photos on odeo.com
  10. Prepare travel plans with itineraries, budgets, correct clothing, etc.

Please refer to the project web site for a full set of rubrics for each of the individual tasks.

Interaction:

  1. The class will be broken into 10 groups of three students.
  2. Within the group there are three main roles; lead researcher, multimedia designer and webmaster. These roles should be assigned to one group member. The roles are as follows;
  3. Lead Research is responsible for verifying all research and choosing what stays and what goes.
  4. Multimedia designer is responsible for editing all photos, graphics and sound files and prepares multimedia for upload. The multimedia designer works with the researcher to ensure all multimedia is related to the chosen research.
  5. Webmaster is responsible for setting up the website, blog, flikr and odeo. They upload and organize all the multimedia and research data.
  6. Once the around the world trip is half finished they choose another group to act as evaluators of your journey so far. They will use the rubric as criteria for the scoring. These marks will not be considered for the final grading.

Tools: