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Building a collaborative website |
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by Julian Morgan,
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Recently I wanted to try out a new method of learning and revising
with some Year 10 students at Derby Grammar School in the UK. Instead
of using my normal methods, I decided to try out a collaborative
approach to the syntax element of the GCSE (a public examination taken
by UK students at age 16), as found in the syllabus documents online at
www.ocr.org.uk .
I had a class of 8 students, working on materials which had already
been taught to them by traditional methods. So each of them had a set
of handwritten notes, taken in class. I found that I could break the
syntax parts of the syllabus into roughly 16 parts, with a little
effort, so I allocated 2 parts to each student. The final list
consisted of:
Expressions of time
Comparison of adjectives and adverbs, including ablative of comparison
Uses of genitive, dative or ablative taken by verbs or adjectives
Cases taken by prepositions
Direct Commands and Prohibitions
Direct Questions
Conditional Sentences
Relative Clauses
Indirect Statement
Indirect Commands
Indirect Questions
Purpose Clauses
Verbs of Fearing
Result Clauses
Temporal Clauses, including standard uses of cum and dum
Uses of participles, including ablative absolutes
Uses of the gerundive to express obligation
I asked each student to work on two parts, taking his written materials
and presenting them in Microsoft Word, as a homework exercise. Then,
using just one double lesson of 80 minutes, I showed them first how to
create an html file in Nvu (a freeware html editor, see www.nvu.com ),
ensuring that they could create local links to a file called
Index.html, on which I would build links to their finished pages as the
lesson took place.
During the lesson, the students built their files and saved their
pages, bringing them to me on their own pen drives as finished files.
By the end of the lesson almost all the files were finished and in
place. Because all links were made as local links, it was simply a
matter of keeping everything in the same folder and checking that the
links worked. After the lesson, I spent some time making sure that
things were in order, before saying that the work was finished. As it
stands, the results can be viewed at www.j-progs.com/DGSyntax .
It has to be said that I have not made everything perfect: this
exercise was more about revising a syllabus and working together on an
assignment than about creating a perfect, finished result. The students
enjoyed it, however, and I think the results speak for themselves,
however imperfect they may be. This kind of work is about the process,
not the result.
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With the support of the European Commission within the framework of the Socrates Comenius programme.