Keystone Science Network - "Focusing Online" Colloquium

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Keystone Science Network Colloquium, April 3, 2001
"Focusing Online," featuring Margaret Ennis.

To spur thinking about how teachers can use web publishing as an effective support mechanism for their classroom practice, we invited Margaret Ennis to the Harcourt Teacher Leadership Center to share her experiences with the KSN participants. Margaret is an educator who has created a gold mine of resources for teachers within Minutes from ME, her section of the TFI Online website. KSN participants also spent the day talking about ways they could use the web more meaningfully—as well as learning to make pages of their own.

Margaret explains her science background and how she got involved working with kids and computers. On the wall behind her is a projection of the homepage of Minutes from ME.

The first web activity Margaret ever made—integrating quilting and learning basic geometric shapes and angles—still lives online here.

Her favorite web resource, Margaret tells the tale of "Mungry Math", the project inspired by Shel Silverstein's poem "Hungry Mungry," about a boy who eats everything. In keeping with the food theme, Margaret and her students graphed what Hungry Mungry ate, including, of course, pie charts.

Great for Valentine's Day, Margaret outlines her "In a Heartbeat" resource which uses miniature marshmallows and toothpicks to demonstrate the power of one's pulse.

The screen image from the "In a Heartbeat" exercise.

For those interested in using HTML to create pages, Margaret shows where on her site she includes basic text for anyone to copy and paste.

Margaret finishes up with words of encouragement, offering her assistance if any of the participants need help with future projects of their own.

After Margaret's presentation, participants break into groups and talk about the reasons why they might like to create their own web resources, education sites that they find useful, current obstacles that they face in using the web, and what they'd love to see online.

The group splits and rotates activities for the remainder of the day. Here, some participants watch a video about an eighth grade science teacher who used a web-based project to foster scientific collaboration between his students and a classroom across the country.

Afterwards, the participants take advantage of web-browsing time to investigate some teacher-created online educational materials.

In the Unisys Teacher Technology Center, Shelby introduces participants to the basics of creating a web page using a web editor.

Susie and Peggy investigate each other's resources.

At the end of the day, many participants walked away feeling more empowered and enthusiastic about the many possibilities the web holds for educators.

The Franklin Institute gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the National Science Foundation and Unisys Corporation.

The Franklin Institute is the Demonstration Site for the Eisenhower Mid-Atlantic Consortium, providing science and math resources for teachers.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9819641.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

webteam@keystone.fi.edu