KENT, Washington—When students search for information online, they're apt to encounter a wide range of resources. "Some Web sites are great, some not so great," says Dana Standlee, a teacher at Emerald Park Elementary located in this suburb of Seattle. "Kids need to learn to skim through Web sites and know how to evaluate them."

That was one of several lessons embedded in a recent classroom project that began with a Webquest to gather information about Native American tribes. The in-depth project integrated social studies and writing, and also taught fourth-graders how to manage their time and work effectively in teams. "There were several different lessons along the way," Standlee says.

She teamed with three other teachers to map out the unit, using planning time the school sets aside to encourage staff to develop project-based units. Standlee is an enthusiastic user of classroom technology. She teaches at a new school that was built to incorporate everything from laptop computers to a mobile multimedia production station. She also spends two years with the same students, who loop with her from third to fourth grade. By their second year in her classroom, she says, "They have already used technology in purposeful ways. We have done electronic presentations, made Web pages, and completed several other assignments using technology as a tool. A Webquest offered one more avenue of technology to explore."

She begins each new project with a "driving question." For this unit she wanted students to consider: "What was it like to live as a Native American in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1800s?" More specifically, she wanted students to work with a partner to compare information about two different tribes, one from a coastal region and the other from the plains.

Standlee wanted to guide students to Web sites that would offer useful and appropriate information. That involved some research time for the teacher. When she did her own Web search for sites about Native Americans, she came up with "sites that had to do with gambling, casinos, lotteries, or advertisements that make them inappropriate for students. I spent a whole day looking for presentable sites," she says.

Once it was the students' turn to conduct online research, Standlee encouraged them to be critical readers. "It's good for students to learn how to weed through sites. They have to learn to skim and scan, and evaluate for quality in the text itself, as well as its source," she says.

Standlee had students use a graphic organizer called a "bubble map" to organize the information they found through online research. The maps help them "see" their ideas in a visual way. During the next step, when students work with a partner to compare and contrast what they have learned, they create a "double bubble" map to represent both students' research findings. This helps them see where their information overlaps and where it differs.

After students finished their research and completed working on comparisons with a partner, they were ready to write a compare-and-contrast essay. Standlee provides students with a scoring rubric that helps them identify traits of effective writing and gives them goals to aim for during the revision and peer-editing process.

For students who wanted to take their project to yet another level, Standlee offered an optional extension activity to do at home: Use their research to produce a newspaper. About a third of her students took up the challenge. Although the poverty rate is at about 30 percent in this school community, most students have access to a computer at home.

One girl used an especially creative approach to designing her publication. She took an actual newspaper published in the local community and pasted her own stories and pictures onto the pages. "I hadn't imagined doing it this way," Standlee says, "and I was delighted. When you give open-ended assignments, you never know what students might come up with."

She has become an advocate of projects that encourage students to be self-directed learners, even though it means a challenging role for the teacher. "You're the coach," she says, "not the giver of information. You're there as a resource, not the expert. Your classroom takes on a beehive environment. Some students do better in a self-directed environment than others."

Standlee began teaching in 1988, and then took a nine-year break to spend more time with her own three children. She returned to the classroom eight years ago and has been incorporating technology and project-based learning ever since. "When I first came back after taking a break from teaching, I was devastated by the changes," she recalls. "But, I quickly realized the importance of learning to use technology as a teaching tool. Technology has opened several doors of learning opportunities for me, so I continue to embrace it. I just keep learning." Emerald Park Elementary is recipient of a Gates Grant, which has meant an infusion of technology and training for teachers. Standlee also has taken the Intel® Teach to the Future training. Using technology to support learning "has become a passion for me," she says.

For information on building Webquests, visit http://webquest.sdsu.edu/*

The project can be seen at http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/staff/
dstandle/nativeamericans/index.htm*