CLASS WEBSITE SERIES

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Lesson 1: Website Layout, Purpose, and Log In

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AGE RANGE:

5TH Grade and Up, Classroom activity for approximately 15-25 students.

 

LENGTH OF TIME:

30-40 minutes

 

MATERIALS:

Computers, Internet Access, WIX

Diagram of website layout to display on overhead

Web layout worksheets, pencils, colored pencils

 

PREPARATION:

• 3 Weeks Before: Send letter to families about WIX, letting them know that students will not be creating individual accounts to maintain privacy.

• 2-4 Days Before: Have WIX established for the class, and website worksheets printed.

• Day of: The projector and computer would need to be set up ahead of time and the computer cued to the class site.

• Before class: Gather worksheets, clipboards and pencils for students in gathering space.

• After class: Worksheets filed into student folders and put away, make notes on class (written or audio file).

 

 

OVERVIEW

 

Digital literacy is not an inherent skill that youth have just because they’ve grown up with media. A Stanford University study showed that even at the high school and college level, students had difficulty evaluating online sources for credibility (Wineburg, McGrew, & Ortega, 2016). Building the foundation for these digital literacy skills can start young and a series of lessons that range from creating links, adding photos, recording audio reviews of books will give them a broad set of technical skills.

 

Focus Activities will center around a specific skill in technology and/or cognitive development that we all complete together such as identifying parts of a website, and how to use the tools on WIX. Vygotsky’s theory of Zone of Proximal Development is used to help students take leaps in building skills they can later apply independently (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2013). Focus activities will help them frame the activity they engage in online with concrete knowledge of the how and why.

 

Finding Activities within the series and will be done in small groups and alone to give students a chance to work on their skills through application. As content contributors, these students to become adept at analyzing what they see, read and hear. Papert’s constructivist theory, Vygotsky’s cognitive development theories and other understand that learning through action is very effective (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2013; Wheeler, 2014). Students will be navigating to the Public Library Website, finding online encyclopedias, searching our physical collection for books to review, and learning to search our catalog. They will also then apply these finding skills to their free activities as needed.

 

Free Activities give the students time to apply skills they’ve learned to their own interest; the ideas behind connected learning and participatory culture are really at play here. They are free to play around with editing their personal contributions, read, watch others build skills, etc. This is true to the idea of affinity spaces, where “people can participate in various sways according to their skills and interests,” (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robinson A.J., & Weigel, 2009).

 

Each lesson in the series will have one or more of these activities. The goal is to keep the Focus Activities short, planning for them to be referenced repeatedly in the Finding and Free Activities. Students can engage in ways that complement their development and will be encouraged to help each other in a shared goal of website building. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory finds that school engagement can have a great impact on a student’s success; I want to give students the tools and free time to build a strong sense of self within this system (Bronfenbrenner, 1994).

 

 

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

 

Lesson 1 of the Class Webpage series will have a few objectives that establish a baseline of knowledge for students as we move forward in the project.

1. Students can name major components of a website.

2. Students can describe the purpose of the library website: To share information related to books, reference, and media.

3. Students will be able to navigate to their website, and identify editing buttons.

 

 

SEQUENCE OF ACTIVITIES

Introduction (5 mins)

The class will gather at tables, or in a sharing circle for the start of class. If we have a routine to shift our attention towards library-time we would do that now, something like using a very soft voice to ask them to put their hands on their head, shrug shoulders, fish lips and finally settle into library mode.

 

"I want you to talk with your neighbor for a minute, and come up with answers for this question; why don’t we let kindergarteners drive cars?"

Let them talk and share responses, guiding them away from the silliness after a few responses and towards the basics of they don’t know how to steer a car, they don’t know how to read signs, and importantly they don’t know what all the knobs, buttons, meters mean.

 

"Our class is going to design and build a website together this year, but right now most of us would be like babies driving cars. We need a little driving school before we get behind the wheel. Give me a single “honk” if you think you can name some parts of a webpage."

Let them respond and move on quickly before it gets noisy and pass out clipboards with worksheets to label parts of a website.

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Activity 1 (5 mins)

"Let’s see how much we know going before we start working on the actual site and we’ll label this website worksheet together."

We will label parts of a website together using Web Layout worksheets (Appendix 1) and diagram on the overhead. I’ll ask the students if they can name the major parts such as header, content, sidebar, etc. They can have time to write in their own silly or serious web addresses, fake content idea or drawings if they seem interested in the worksheet.

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"What sorts of websites do you go use at home and here?" (Allow a few responses, share examples like websites to sell things, websites to learn, websites for fans.)

"We want to make sure that we remember what our websites goal is while we work on it this year. Because this is a library website it will be about information and media: books, comics, statistics (like for sports), Real vs. Fake info, How-To-Guides. We won’t be selling toys, houses, or elephants."

 

Activity 2 (15 mins)

Introduction of the class website shared on the overhead projector.

 

Students will move to the computers that have been logged into my WIX account. They will find the pre-made website I named for each individual. We will walk through the process of adding their names to their header and ask them to identify menus and tools. If we move quickly as a group, I will have them all practice changing their background too.

"These accounts are for practice, these will NOT be published unless you get permission from your grown-up. As a class we will only be publishing one website that you will building together. We’ll work on skills in our personal practice site during Focus Activities."

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Wrap-Up (5 mins)

Go over how the 3 F’s will apply to this lesson series and let them know about next week.

"We all know that in the library we are always doing one of the three F’s. For this project Focus Activities will be stuff like recording audio, writing book reviews, adding pictures to the website. Our Finding Activities will be finding cool websites to link to, books to read for our reviews, searching through the tutorials I will post on our class site. The Free Activities are going to be up to you to practice web skills. If you want to work offline drawing, practicing a script, looking for cool books you can totally do that.

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Start thinking about what fiction or non-fiction book you might review for the website, and we’ll be working on that next week. Thank you and see you all next week!"

 

 

ASSESSMENT

 

The first learning objective will be to identify the basic parts of a website, and I will have their worksheets to look at after class. This objective will be reinforced with future lessons, using terminology over and over to help cement it in their memory. As they work together and ask questions, I will be able to see how well they adopt and use the terms.

 

The second learning objective will require talking with students in subsequent classes and seeing if they can remember what our class website does. Engaging with them while they do their Free Activities will also provide insight into how well they understand the purpose of the library websites.

 

The third learning objective will simply be assessed as we move through the activity. I will observe if they able to log in, change their background. Their previous experience using internet and school sites before this will make this a fairly simple learning objective for logging in, but I expect some confusion as the first few times they are using the website editor.

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REFERENCES

 

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological Models of Human Development. In U. Gauvain, M. & Cole, M. (Eds.), In International Encyclopedia of Education, Vol. 3, 2nd. Ed. Oxford: Elsevier (2nd ed., pp. 37–34). NY: Freeman.

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Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robinson A.J., & Weigel, M. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the twenty-first century. Cambridge, MA: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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McDevitt, T. M., & Ormrod, J. E. (2013). Child Development and Education (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NY: Pearson/Merrill-Prentice Hall.

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Wheeler, S. (2014). Learning, making and powerful ideas. Retrieved June 5, 2019, from Learning with ’e’s website: http://www.steve-wheeler.co.uk/2014/09/learning-making-and-powerful-ideas.html

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Wineburg, S., McGrew, S., & Ortega, T. (2016). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Stanford History Education Group.