The goal of English 4 (Speech and Presentation) has been to have students focus less on the act of producing a presentation and more on the consideration of HOW they can present material to their classmates in such a way as to both engage them and teach them something new about a specific topic. The first two projects of this class had students group doing live face-to-face lessons, each lasting 40 minutes.
With Project 3, the aim was for student groups to develop their lessons for a different type of media: the internet. As we all know, the internet is a valuable resource for learning about any topic imaginable. In Project 3, student groups were tasked with transforming their content from Project 2 into a website that would engage and instruct the reader using the affordances possible with the internet above and beyond the simple notation of text.
Each website had to follow certain basic guidelines, including:
- a specific URL (using tinyurl.com)
- an embedded copy of the original podcast file
- an annotated transcript of the podcast (hyperlinks added to key terms and people that would lead to more information)
- individual pages created by each member of the group focused on some aspect of this online lesson.
With this task, students were able to develop valuable skills in communication, collaboration, website design, research, and in taking advantage of different types of media to enhance a message.
Here are the instructions for making the URL:
By using this system, we now have an easy way to access 20 different websites without having to look for links. Each group URL is: https://tinyurl.com/f23g#-m or https://tinyurl.com/f23g#-r
In the URL, “f23” refers to the fall semester of the 2023 school year. The “-m” and the “-r” refer to the two different classes that did this project. For g#, there were 10 groups per class (g1 -g10), so the URL Group 3 in the -m class would be: https://tinyurl.com/f23g3-m, while the URL for Group 5 in the -r class would be: https://tinyurl.com/f23g5-r
With the above information, you now have the “secret” to quickly access 20 different student-produced websites on a variety of topics.
*The cover image of this post is from the games page of Group 1 -M who focused on what astronauts eat in space.