You have been exploring the vast seas of information. You have collected treasures and charted your course. As you head for home you wonder how you can make the most of the wonderful variety of material within your grasp. Your ship is full of treasure: some for you, some for your students, and some for your colleagues.

 You have to organize and shape that which you have gathered and learned, into tools and products learning. You have the organizational skills; the challenge will be in using them with a new medium and facilitating your students/colleagues in doing the same.
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Goals

• Organize information for practical application
• Design, develop and evaluate information products and solutions
• Design a research project which will engage students in authentic research by posing fundamental questions that cut across the curriculum, do not have prescribed answers, and involve students in compelling work which matters to them
• Apply information in critical thinking and problem solving

There are no limits to the ways you or your students may present material learned. It may be a butcher paper mural or a 3-D, interactive multimedia production. It is safe to say you can all make, and help guide students through the construction of a butcher paper mural. So there will be no need for butcher paper skills here.

 On the other hand, it is not likely we can say the same thing about multimedia presentations or the web pages. Creating a mural depends on your access to butcher paper, crayons, paint, and markers. You mastered the organizational skills and probably swing a pretty mean marker. Web presentations are another story. You just can't go to the closet and roll out enough computers and software for your students. Much depends on accessibility to technology and availability of software. Of course time is a factor, and the skills needed to create the product have no small influence on the final product.

The purpose of your presentation will shape the nature of your pages. Among other things, you can use them to deliver instruction locally, gather information globally, or as a guide to students participating in an engaging, authentic challenging task (ACT). If you are creating pages for your students to use, you need to be able to do it quickly and efficiently.

 Your students may create pages for many reasons, including demonstrating what they have learned through collaborative projects or individual research, provide a learning resource for others, or simply to entertain. If your students are going to create pages to present their learning, they need to do it in a way that doesn't result in inordinate amount of time being devoted to the technology involved in the delivery. The technology should assist and enhance learning, not take away from, or be the focus of it. It is a web design philosophy of " less is more."

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Learning Activities

• ExamineThe Big Six Skills © Information Problem-Solving Approach to Library and Information Skills Instruction, as a method of synthesis. (Eisenberg & Berkowitz)
• Explore Jamie McKenzie's "Designing School Web Sites to Deliver. " Reflect on how these ideas and issues impact on you and your curriculum.
• Learn basic HTML tags and web editor functions while creating a practice web page
• Examine this set of rubrics used in Southern Regional High School's web publishing elective, as a means of helping students organize and synthesize what they have learned. It is an adaptation of rubrics used by the International CyberFair. Apply it to you school's web site or one with which you are familiar.
• Create a story board of a web site for your classroom or school
• Learn about WebQuests as a template for ACTs
• In a group of 4-5, participate in AWebQuest about WebQuests
• Create a WebQuest to suit your curriculum needs.

• Sonoma State Center for Critical Thinking
• Differences between critical and non-critical thinking
• HTML Goodies