Using the Web in an English Literature Class
To prepare her ninth-grade students to learn about the Harlem Renaissance, teacher Melanie Hudnall began by asking them to tell her what they already knew about the topic. She listed what they knew — which was relatively little — and followed up by having students visit relevant websites she had identified:
Harlem Renaissance (at Microsoft’s online version of its Encarta encyclopedia)
The Harlem Renaissance (pages in the Ethnic Studies area of the University of Southern California website)
The Harlem Renaissance (pages at the website of Father Ryan High School in Nashville, Tennessee)
After visiting the sites, the students created many intriguing questions to guide their study of the topic in text material.
Melanie’s preparation lesson was similar to the KWL activity (Ogle, 1986). The first step was listing what students already knew (the K in KWL), and the second was guiding students to think about what they wanted to know. Both of these steps are part of preparation as they determine and build background. Melanie’s students remained engaged throughout the unit because they had “ownership” of the unit content. The tools they used to learn the content material were reading in an Internet environment and discussing which of their many questions they wanted to incorporate into the lessons.