District/School Administration PK-16 Program Support Educational Technology
Technology Toolkit

The Greyhound Bus® Depot
Wareham Public Schools and Virtual High School

Evidence of Effectiveness

Instructional objective: Students will use the web to research the historical and cultural contexts for the literature they are studying and then write a travelogue or travel brochure presenting their findings.

Evaluation: All students were required to use language correctly and follow the rules for standard English grammar and syntax. Their presentations had to be complete and fully developed. The connections students made to the literature also had to demonstrate an understanding at some level of the impact of the historical and cultural setting and context of a story to the story itself. The depth of this understanding was contingent on the skills the students brought to the assignment.

Student improvement: Students often commented that this assignment helped them understand the literature a bit more deeply and that it added to their appreciation of the text. In their written analysis of the literature, the teacher found references to details learned in this assignment and an appreciation for nuances in the text that required an understanding of the historical and cultural contexts.

The teacher's main reason for doing this was to convey information to students without lecturing (or in the case of the online environment, without writing lengthy introductions to the weekly units). Students tend to forget information that is told to them more readily than information they have to dig out on their own. The whimsical and creative writing aspects of the assignment put the gathering of the information into a more enjoyable context that caused the information to linger in students' minds a bit longer. Students often created cultural conflicts for themselves or embarrassing situations due to differences in cultural points of view that enabled them to have a bit of fun with the material. The first-person aspect of the assignment helped students personalize the information, and seemed to also provoke a longer lasting relationship with what was learned.

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