To the Teacher
“Eureka, The Gold Rush Is On!” was the first students’
project that I had ever published on the Internet and I wanted to make it motivating
both for me and the kids. To accomplish this, I tried to keep the overall process
as simple and straightforward as possible. Some of the steps and choices that
I made for this project, I will want my students to do themselves, in the future.
Making
the Essays and Illustrations
1) First, I determined the main subject - the California Gold
Rush - and the eight subtopics (Discovery of Gold, etc.) I chose key subtopics
that had information readily available in the classroom.
2) I then did a lottery to assign students their subtopics.
Since my class size was twenty-one, each team had two or three kids.
3) Students next read, took notes, and summarized information
in their social studies books related to their subtopics.
4) Each team then wrote a short essay based on their notes.
5) The students then word processed their essays using AlphaSmarts
(our school has a cart with 20+ Alphas.)
6) I then transferred the essays to the computer and to Dreamweaver,
the html editor that our school uses. (We were fortunate to have help on this
part of the project thanks to our school’s technology coordinator, Mr.
Lorin Spaulding.)
7) The kids then drew pictures, which I scanned and saved in
GIF format. We added these illustrations to the essays, again with Dreamweaver.
8) I also scanned and added a photo of James Marshall’s
statue that a child had taken while on a field trip to Coloma.
Finishing the Project
1) For each essay, I added some additional Internet links that
my students and I had discovered. We emphasized primary sources, such as letters
home from an actual Gold Rush miner or original pictures of the Oregon Trail.
2) I also added a link called ‘Three Routes to California,’
including a telecollaboration that my class had done. The kids wrote mock letters
persuading their “families” to come to the mother lode via either
the Oregon Trail, Cape Horn, or the Panama shortcut. Other students from around
the world then responded to questions related to my students’ letters.
3) Since I had used a supermarket camera to take photos of my
kids on a class day trip, I had these developed on a CD and added them to “About
the Authors.” (Naturally, I got parental permission prior to publishing
kids’ pictures on the Web.)
4) Next, the teams each read aloud their essays and showed their
illustrations to their classmates.
5) During a class brainstorming session, the students made up
questions and creative multiple-choice answers. Lorin Spaulding turned these
into our entertaining electronic quiz.
6) This project made a wonderful presentation at our spring
Open House. I set the project up on the computer, plus a video projector and
screen, and the students delighted in showing it to their parents.
7) And, next year, my new students will enjoy learning about the California Gold Rush by viewing and studying this project.