Students learn a different way

By Sarah Lang/The Lebanon Reporter

Lebanon — One Lebanon Middle School teacher is getting a jump start on preparing her students for college — in two unexpected ways.

Tammy Stuart’s eighth-grade honors English class — though meeting every day in school — has had a totally online existence since September through wikispace, an online site where permitted users can log in and share content. And the class just completed a multi-genre research project on Dracula, a project they’re especially proud of.

“These students really, really are proud, and they should be,” Stuart said of her 20 students. “This class drives itself.”

At the beginning of the school year, Stuart asked her students what they would like to do for the year. The students were briefly exposed to wikispaces in the sixth and seventh grades, said student Bekie Stergar, and this is what they chose.

“It’s like an online class,” said student Katie O’Rourke.

The setup is very similar to the common college Web site, Blackboard. Stuart posts messages and assignments online, the students complete them and, to turn them in, post them back on the Web site. The classroom is virtually paperless.

“We upload study guides and vocab, everything, instead of turning in papers,” said student Andy Miller. “There’s more than 1,400 files on here from the year so far.”

The students are big fans of the process, and they understand that it is preparing them for college courses that will be less rigid than a traditional classroom.

The timeline and due dates for assignments aren’t set in stone. Stuart gives suggested progress dates along the way, but the only solid date is the for the very end of a project, when everything is due.

“I’ve had trouble with budgeting my time,” Stergar said. “I ended up doing everything all during spring break. Actually, fall break, too. It’s preparing me.”

And though the transition from paper to Internet was difficult for some, they all agree that the positives far outweigh the negatives.

For one, they don’t need to lug around heavy English binders full of study guides, papers and assignments, O’Rourke said, for when they go to their grandparents’ houses, for example. And the wikispace offers a private, e-mail-type messaging system, so if somebody needs help, they can just ask a classmate.

“It’s good because somebody is always online,” O’Rourke said. “So we can ask questions and help each other out.”

Stuart is also often there to help out, though she sets some expectations.

“From 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., I make them no promises,” she joked, referring to how the students sometimes expect her to be online at all times.

And though cheating may be easier, since all students can see whatever is posted by each other, it is also easier to catch, since each post has a time and date stamp.

“It wouldn’t be worth it to even try,” said class member Stuart Rivers.

The possibility of successfully cheating was also rendered impossible in the students’ latest project — a multi-genre research project on Dracula — since Stuart required the students to turn in all of their research, every single source they pulled information from.

But the students didn’t put all the information together into a long, black-and-white research paper, where every page looks the same as the one before. Instead, Stuart assigned each student a topic related to Dracula — such as “blood is life” or “are vampires real?” — and they picked seven different “genres” in which to express what they learned.

The students created newspaper articles, Instant Message conversations between characters, letters, recipes, shopping lists, postcards, vampire baseball cards, and even a board game similar to “Clue.”

“It challenged our creative side and made us think differently,” said student Betsy Williams.

“You didn’t have to worry about it all tying together (like in a research paper),” said class member Wilda Knecht, “because it just tied together on its own.”

Stuart admitted she had never tried a project of this caliber with students of this age, but she is extremely proud of what they accomplished.

“I wanted them to learn how to do a research paper without being bored out of their minds,” she said. “And this teaches them different writing styles, citations; it teaches all aspects in a creative way. And I’m more than impressed. They exceeded all my expectations.

“They knew darn, good and well that I’ve never asked students this young to do this, but they never complained. They totally blew me away, but they’ve been doing that from the beginning of the year.”

Though this is one of the only assignments Stuart required the students to turn in on paper this year — since so much of it was created, not only written — they are soon turning the projects into PDF documents to put online to share with others.

“This project surprised us because it was so easy,” Stergar said. “It was so easy and fun, we had to second-guess ourselves. It’s as fun as school can get.”

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