How can my students use Strategy Tutor if I haven’t created a lesson?
Students can use Strategy Tutor as a tool to accomplish a research task that you’ve assigned in class
Scenario A
Ms. Rosario’s class has been reading the novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Students can’t believe the kind of discrimination that the family faced. Ms. Rosario decides that students would benefit from learning more about discrimination and the civil rights movement.
In class, she asks students to go online with Strategy Tutor to research examples of discrimination. They will start a new project. She wants them to find at least two examples from different websites. She tells students to use the web evaluation strategy to evaluate each website. Then, when they find a good example, they should use the summary strategy to describe the example and the feeling strategy to show how they would feel if they encountered such discrimination. They will share their example in class. She explains the task in class (option- provide a handout)
Ms. Rosario’s class goes to the computer lab twice a month. So, the next time they go to the lab, they conduct this research, saving their work to their worklogs.
Class presentation: Ms. Rosario has a TV and one computer in her classroom. She connects her computer for display and opens her teacher view of the worklog. As students come up to present, she selects each student’s project from the worklog. This allows them to share their response and to click on the website so that everyone can see the webpage that shows their example of discrimination.
Students create a class collage of discrimination, with each student contributing a summary and a visual to the collage.
Scenario B
Mr. Darren wants to do the same thing with his students, but he doesn’t have any lab time for the next month. He does have two computers in his classroom. He asks two students to research on the web for the class using Strategy Tutor. This is a quick search, “Take 15 minutes and see how many examples you can find for us. Evaluate each site so you will have a record in your worklog.”
Presentation: Once the students have found several examples, they use the computer projector to display what they’ve found (they click on the urls in their worklog for the top sites that they’ve found).
