From Viet Nam to Crohn’s Disease
Students and teachers find their audience by reaching out over the ‘net
by Gary Clites
Originally published in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund's Adviser Update, Spring 2000
The Internet offers great promise for both students and teachers interested in educational communication. But much of that communication thus far has included little more than regurgitating the print contents of yearbooks and newspapers onto the Web. The tremendous number of student publications moving onto the Web is great as far as it goes, but it doesn’t begin to touch the tremendous potential of the Web. A few educators and their students are working toward that potential, publishing sites on the Web that are informative and point to where we are all headed in the new century.
Escalation (http://brainsoft.ne.mediaone.net/escalation/arsdigita.htm), a site created by then high school senior Nathaniel Duca using classroom materials developed by his history teacher and friend Kevin O’Reilly, became a finalist in the 1999 ArsDigita Competition for Young Web Site Developers. A simulation game on the order of those Choose Your Own Adventure Books, the site puts visitors in the position of President Lyndon Johnson.
It is 1964. You are up for reelection, and communists are seriously threatening a takeover of South Viet Nam. Do you send more troops into the country? Support negotiations? Assist in military coups? Every decision you make leads to more questions and problems as you play the role of president from 1964 to 1968. The site offers in-depth background briefings, statistical information and powerful images from the era to inform your decisions. Ultimately, the visitor is left to experience some of the burdens Johnson faced as he involved us more and more deeply in America’s longest war.
A tremendous teaching tool on the period, the site serves as an example of the kind of collaboration that is possible between students and teachers on the Internet. O’Reilly had developed the unit as a classroom teaching tool. He handed his work on paper over to Duca for translation onto the Web. Since then, the site has logged thousands of hits, and the two are developing a PC version of the game which will begin selling in early 2000.
Designed for a much more limited audience, but just as instructive with regard to how students can use the Web to communicate, the Teens with Crohn’s Disease site (http://pages.prodigy.net/mattgreen) was created by Matt Green and put online in November 1996. Then a high school sophomore at Titusville High School in Titusville, Florida, Green suffered from the disease and was frustrated by his inability to get information on it or to discuss his problems with others in the same situation.
Crohn’s disease is a painful inflammation of the bowel and lower intestine that is set off when a sufferer’s own antibodies react to certain foods. After a major attack of the disease, Green decided to create a Web site for his fellow sufferers. Visually a little dull, with most of the pages little more than text on yellow or mustard colored backgrounds, the site has, nonetheless, become a clearinghouse for information and communication for teens with Crohn’s from around the world. It includes personal experiences posted by sufferers; extensive lists of recipes to help teens make their favorite foods without using ingredients that will set off an attack; a bulletin board on which visitors post questions and help in a lively exchange; and an active chat room full of teens talking about Crohn’s along with the events of the day or whatever strikes their fancy.
Now a student in college, Green monitors the site every day, except when he’s tied up with finals. Heavily used and clearly a positive influence on those who visit it, the site has even managed to garner commercial advertising for its chat room. It is a good example of how a student site can find an audience on the Web and affect its visitors substantially.
Just as substantial, though targeted toward teachers rather than teens, is Only a Matter of Opinion? (http://library.advanced.org/50084), a teacher-created site that won the platinum award (basically, first place) in the “Materials in Content Area” category of the first ever ThinkQuest for Teachers competition for 1999. ThinkQuest (http://www.thinkquest.org) has been around for four years as a contest for students, but 1999 was the first year it included a category for teachers.
An attractive, smoothly operating and quick-loading site, Opinion? is basically an online curriculum for teaching editorial communications. The site includes units on editorial and column writing, as well as an exploration of editorial cartoons. Carol Lange, an award-winning teacher in the Fairfax County, Virginia Public Schools, served as team leader; Xian Ke, a former Advanced Placement student of Lange’s served as technology coordinator; Ron Bennett of Rick’s College in Rexburg, Idaho and Diane Weber of the Jefferson County Baccalaureate School in Birmingham, Alabama rounded out the team. Each section of the unit is clear and informative. The “Commentary and Columns” section, for example, includes pages on how to write columns; different styles of columns; biographies of significant columnists with quotes regarding the form; along with examples and lesson ideas.
Precisely designed and showing great depth, the site serves as a fine example of teacher-to-teacher communication online. If curricular materials are to be made available over the ‘net, they should all be designed in this user-friendly a manner.
We head into the 21st century with a new medium available for educational communications. Students and teachers are blazing new trails on the ‘net as they work to find an audience. Sites like these are fine examples of those first solid steps into the new technological landscape.
© Gary Clites, 2000