Bringing instructional strategies and computer technology together effectively has been the holy grail for many educators for the last 30 years. Matching appropriate software with our curriculum needs has been, at best, challenging. Many of the pre-designed packages available on the commercial market have elements that simply do not fit what we are trying to accomplish. Last school year at Senior High in Billings these writers decided to solve part of this problem by developing a software solution that allows English teachers to teach writing skills while integrating technology into their curriculum in a fairly simple way.
Billings School District #2 has embraced the Six Traits Writing Process as a way to improve writing skills of all students. Many teachers across the district have received training in this approach that originated in Beaverton, Oregon, in the mid-1980s. Six Traits Writing is a systematic approach for looking at writing one part at a time. Since writing is such a complicated activity, this approach helps many people break down the task and understand it better.
By focusing on and scoring only one trait at a time, a writer/reader can break down a complex activity like writing and make it more manageable. With practice, writers can then learn to be more critical of their own work and can make improvements in the quality of their writing. Perhaps, more than anything else, the six traits give teachers and students a common vocabulary for talking and thinking about writing. The six traits include Content, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions.
Earlier this year, we were discussing what we might be doing for internship projects for our masters degree program in Educational Technology at MSU-Billings. Steve’s interests were in learning more about technology and how it might be useful in his English curriculum. Vince’s interest was in instructional design and he wanted to apply his computer skills in a area outside his own of Technology Education. A collaboration was born with Steve serving as the content expert in the Six Trait Writing Process and Vince in CGI programming. Both of us worked on the HTML for the web pages and did the site layout and design.
What has resulted is a web site that teachers can use to assist in the teaching of the Six Trait Writing Process. The site has standard features such as a description of each of the traits, their rubrics, and examples. The rubrics use a 5-point rating system and include samples of 1, 3, and 5 point writings for each of the six traits. All samples are actual high school student writings, gleaned from hundreds of samples that have been collected over the last few years. The ratings were made by several English teachers, reflecting a cross section in rating styles.
What makes this site unique is that it is interactive in a way that goes beyond the basic hyperlinks. Teachers can create an online account for a class and receive one for each student. Students can then log on to the system through the web site and work their way through 10 exercises for each of the six traits. In an exercise the student is presented with a writing sample and rates it from 1 to 5. The software then returns a new web page indicating how the English teachers would have rated the same writing sample. The student can view a status page that indicates what exercise he has completed. In the current version of the software, the student can go back and change his rating if he wishes.
One advantage of using this technology to help teach the Six Trait Writing Process is the data that is collected. For the teacher there is a page where she can get a snapshot of how the class is doing. The Class Status page displays a table showing, for each of the exercises, the assigned rating, the number of students who have responded, and an average of the student ratings. Clicking on the student average will display, both graphically and as raw data, the rating distribution. With these tools, the teacher can get a picture of how the class, as a whole, is doing in recognizing levels of writing according to the Six Trait model.
The site is available on the Internet to any teacher who wishes to use it. Teachers may create as many class accounts as they wish and receive 40 student accounts with each class account. The address is senior.billings.k12.mt.us/6traits/index.htm
Steve Gardiner has been teaching high school English for 21 years in Wyoming, Peru, and now at Billings Senior High. Vince Long teaches technology education, computer programming, and drafting at Billings Senior High. Both authors are candidates for master’s degrees in educational technology from Montana State University-Billings.
Over the years of computer and software development, many ways of saving images on a computer have come about. Some types are proprietary, made to work with one piece of software, while others have become standards that are used throughout the industry.
Images come in two varieties: bit-mapped and vector. Bit-mapped formats come in three types:
Type Description uncompressed These images are saved in a bit-by-bit manner. These files tend to be large. Examples are TIF and BMP. non-lossy compressed When saving this type of format, the software looks for repetitive data that can be recorded with fewer bits, which results in a smaller file. When they are opened, the original image is rebuilt and contains all of the original data. An example of this type of image is the GIF. lossy compressed When saving this type of format, the software looks for anything that it can throw away the it thinks will not effect the looks of the original image when it is reopened. Some original data is lost with this technique, but when using with continuous-tone images, such as photographs, the process is usually not noticeable. Resulting files sizes are very small, making this technique ideal for transmitting images over a network. The JPG is an example of this image format.
Image editing programs come in two types. First, there are programs that will edit bit-mapped images and second, there are those that edit vector-type images. A few can edit both types.
A bit-mapped image is one that is made up of small dots, called pixels. These dots can each be a variety of colors and collectively they may up the final image. The images on a computer monitor are bit-mapped because they are actually built from small red, green, and blue dots on the screen. A newspaper image is also made of small dots.
Bit-mapped images can be produced using software like Adobe Photoshop or with a scanner. Photoshop allows the user to perform many changes to the original image, adding textures, stretching, rotating, etc.
The primary disadvantage to bit-mapped images is that when they are enlarged or rotated, the lines can become "jaggy." When they are reduced in size the clarity of the image, and its colors, can become muddy looking.
The second type of image, the vector-based, is created by computer-aided drafting or illustration programs like AutoCAD, Adobe Illustrator, or Corel Draw. In these images, the individual points that make up a line do not actually exist, except on your computer monitor, or in the final print. The software only stores the coordinates of the endpoints of the lines and information about their color and width. Because objects created in this manner are essentially mathematical representations, they can be rotated, scaled, etc. without degrading the quality of the image.
There are no shortage of ways to assist today’s web surfer in navigating the Internet. We have portals like Yahoo, Netscape, and Hotbot which are arranged in broad subject areas allowing us to "drill down" from the general to the specific until we, hopefully, find that gem of knowledge that we seek. We also have the "old fashioned" search engines like AltaVista, Excite, and Google that allow Boolean-driven searches of the Internet, or at least a portion of it, returning thousands of "hits," some of which are actually useful.
Intelligent searches are becoming more common. Ask Jeeves, at www.ask.com, attempts to serve the user as an Internet butler. The user types in a question, in plain English, and Jeeves returns with a list of questions for which it knows the answer. Type in:
Where can I find information about the mining of bauxite?
and Jeeves returns four questions, including
Where can I find a concise encyclopedia article on mining?
and
Where can I find a concise encyclopedia article on bauxite?
The interesting part of the Jeeves approach is that in the questions it returned, keywords appear in pull-down menus, allowing the user to zero in on more specific targets or see related information. For example, in the returned question, "Where can I find a concise encyclopedia article on mines?" the pull-down menu containing the word "mines" had many other choices, in this case from "methanol" to "minstrel." In the second returned question, "Where can I find a concise encyclopedia article on bauxite?" the word "bauxite" could be changed to a ranged of choices from "atriums" to "bayberries."
Jeeves also looks in a few of the other on-line search engines for information related to the search. In the above example, Jeeves provided a link to 10 hits via Webcrawler including:
the economy of Guyana
Australian Mining History
GEHO Pumps for Sludge and Slurry
Stratum Resources Mining Consulting Services
While Jeeves is certainly a glimpse at where intelligent searching might be headed, a few glitches in the site returned network errors instead of the desired information. For the info-voyeur, Jeeves also has a feature allowing visitors to view questions being asked by other users of the site. This page, containing about 20 questions at a time, updates every thirty seconds, offering hours of info-tainment. It also has a switch that lets the viewer filter out objectionable questions.
One of the more useful, and under-utilized, methods of finding information on the web is the use of a WebRing. A web ring is a list of sites that have similar information or share a like subject area. For example, there is a web ring of sites that are dedicated to the history of the Civil War and each of these sites has a link to another of Civil War site on the ring. While each site has it’s own individual approach and area of focus, the content is related to the topic area of that ring.
What makes the rings different from other sites that simply provide links to related sites, the links are maintained at the home of web rings: www.webring.org. WebRing.org uses a "portal" approach, like that found at Yahoo, to direct users to a general subject area which they click through to find a more specific area of interest. Each site on a web ring features a menu that lets the user select other sites on that ring. The menu looks something like this:
[Skip Prev] [Prev] [Next] [Skip Next] [Random] [Next 5]
[List Sites]
Here’s how a trip through a ring might work. From the directory list at www.webring.org, under "Miscellaneous," clicking on "Animals and Pets" delivers a list of hundreds of related sites. Selecting "Abyssinian Cat Ring," provides a list of the 18 members’ sites. Clicking on an item from the list opens an individual page on the ring which sports the standard ring menu from which other sites on the ring can be selected.
Starting a ring is not difficult and it is free, though the Help Page warns that it can be time consuming for the fledgling ringmaster who must attract a minimum of 5 sites for the ring to be added to the directory at www.webring.org. They suggest joining an existing ring, and with over 80,000 individual rings already operating, this does appear to be a good idea.
The primary advantage of using web rings for finding information is that the quantity of content on the World Wide Web has grown beyond the ability of the standard search engines to completely index it. One recent study suggested that no more than 12-40% of all web pages are available through the search engines today www.research.digital.com/SRC/whatsnew/sem.html. Getting on a web ring can take a user through a set of related sites containing a wealth of information that might be overlooked by standard navigation methods.
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