Fully Online, Self-Paced ELA 10 Research Unit
Kathryn Polus
In her project Kathryn designed a fully online, self paced, asynchronous component for 10th grade English Language Arts class. It included resources, guided lessons and assistive technology to help and support students in mastering the standards and improve their research skills. While designing this site she confirmed that towards the end of this unit students should be able to collect resources to support their research work, they can check the relevance and give proper credit to the online resources, and find research that support their claim. And based on all these they should effectively articulate a position based on the research. On the main page of this site she explained this along with the Michigan State standard for content and ISTE standards for technology.
Under the research project section, the instructions were very clear. First step was about examining the themes of justice and forgiveness, virtue and vengeance by selecting a historical injustice incident. While explaining it, students were asked to evaluate the background, the long term effect of it, and articulate their statement. She provided a document with proper guidelines and expected formatting including citation requirements. After this, students were asked to take the quiz to test their understanding. Students were allowed to retake the quiz till they got 100% on it.
Once students understood the flow and expectation about how to write the research, Kathryn gave them macro topics and let them choose any three options. She asked them to document why they think those are the best choices. After their study students shared their work and the research evidence. In the following step students checked their work for Plagiarism,MLA Citation and Source Evaluation.
All the instructions were provided and the site was user friendly, which made it easy to navigate especially for the asynchronous study. It provided support for students learning. Various digital tools such as edpuzzle, word cloud, google doc were used to maximize active, deep learning. Students had a choice about how to submit and which technology to use. This empowered them to be innovative while choosing technology for presenting their work. Kathryn gave them the option to choose alternative ways for presenting their final research work- as a regular essay format, 5 to 10 minutes podcast or 5 to 10 pages multimedia presentation. It gave students a chance to demonstrate competency on use of technology.The work was then shared with peers and shared their thoughts through video conferencing tools.
This great project was designed based on the ISTE standards, Triple E framework. This capstone was expanded to include best use of technology tools, online learning and content standards. The author considered it is beneficial for her department for online, face-to-face and hybrid learning.