Research: Content: Publishing
Publishing projects involve students in posting information about what they are doing at their schools. Although some projects ask for critiques or feedback, most publishing projects are intended as final products to be shared with the world.
Writing, Artwork, Music, Multimedia Creations
Students can create a web project that represents a fiction and/or nonfiction original work. It could be an interactive work of fiction, a nonfiction exploration of a topic or issue, or a musical composition. Consider alternative presentation formats. You might use a "choose your own adventure" format or a linear fictional story with nonfiction links on each page. Create a historical fiction story that links to facts about the time period on a timeline. Consider something unique like information about your town or state that might be interesting people in your community.
Students can publish their word processed creative writing, poems, articles, and critiques. They can share their artwork including photographs, scans of artwork, digitized pictures of sculptures, masks, and other 3D art. Finally, they can post their Hyperstudio projects, and desktop presentations.
Experiences
Use real-world experiences to bring the outside world closer to your students. Students have many exciting experiences at school. Classrooms are starting to share these experiences through the development of virtual field trips, reflection pages, and other experience-based web pages. Ask students to think about their audience. What would other people like to know about their experiences? How could they help others who might suffer through a similar experience?
Children who experience a traumatic event such as a natural disaster are expressing their feelings through web pages. Many children who lived through the Japanese earthquake or Hurricane Katrina shared experiences on the Internet.
Inquiry
Learning involves exploration and discovery. Inquiry projects ask students to reflect on their knowledge, ask questions, and seek answers. For example, in the Pigeon Inquiry students share their experiences learning about pigeons. Many inquiry pages are set up with the following categories: what we thought we knew, what questions we had, what we found in books and on the Internet, our data, and our conclusions. Inquiry projects can be developed for all subject areas.
Action
Start an issues forum. Take a stand on an important social issue or discuss an environmental concern. Focus on local social activism, but link to national and international resources. Post your local projects. For example, show pictures before and after a local park clean-up effort. When you plan action projects, be sure that students act, not just write about the project.
Increasingly, students are taking action on topics and issues where they have exhibited great concern. For example, Epatrol is a large-scale project that asks students to display their artwork and opinions related to ecology and the environment.
Research
Students have always made book reports and completed term papers. Today, an increasing number of students are publishing their work on the Internet. These research projects have often expanded to include oral histories, community projects, and lab experiments. Be creative! You might use a metaphor such as a museum, book, or a time machine to present your information. Consider a character or theme that could lead you through information throughout the project.
Information Resource
Start an information resource that could be used by others. You might design a region page, lizard page, or limerick page. It could have links to other sites as well as lots of original information. Include bibliographies and reviews of materials. Ask other people to provide input and ideas. Career information and contact center, a hobbies page, and a collection page are other possibilities.
Demonstrations
Create an online demonstration project. It could teach a skill, describe an experiment, or illustrate the correct/incorrect procedure for an activity. This type of project would be highly visual and contain graphics, photographs, or movies that would help a user understand the concept.
Some students want to share their understanding of a particular skill or demonstrate how to make something so others could make it themselves.
Alternative Products
Develop a model that could be used by students to learn about a topic or gain ideas for their own product. For example, create an interactive travel brochure including clickable maps, a greeting in the country's native language, and lists of destinations and activities. Or, create an interactive timeline that would provide information about major historical events and biographical sketches of historic figures.
Some of the best student-produced web projects come from two global projects: ThinkQuest and CyberFair. ThinkQuest and ThinkQuest Jr. are annual web publishing contests. Students submit a project-based on one of the subject areas or an interdisciplinary area. Projects are judged on a series of categories including their ability to teach and interact with users. For example, the Faces and Figures In Art project focuses on art featuring people. It including information, examples, galleries, forums, quizzes, and a workshop.
The CyberFair project encourages international teams to work together on collaborative projects on topics such as local specialities, the arts, and the environment. The Exploravision project is an example of one of the many other contest sites. This contest focuses on science. Spend some time exploring examples from these projects before designing your own.