Teaching Comparative

A teaching tool

I just finished updating my catalog of teachers' web pages for Advanced Placement Comparative Government and Politics.

I've always been curious to see what other teachers are doing, how they describe what they're doing, and how they use the web. You too might find good ideas among the pages that people created for their courses.

I looked at more than 60 web sites for Comparative Goverment that Google led me to, so I feel like I'm an expert at the moment.

And my "teaching comparative" award for best course-related web site goes to John Unruh-Friesen at Hopkins High School in Minnetonka, Minnesota.

See if there are ideas there that you could use.

(Full disclosure: John teaches at the school I taught in for 34 years before I retired. I have been familiar with his site and I know he had help from some very skilled students in putting it together. Plus he's pretty technologically competent himself. But I don't think my familiarity has biased my judgment. You can look for yourself and tell me what you think.)

His site is simply "APGov.org."

It may sound simple, but he uses the site in a variety of ways.

• The main page lists John's reactions to things he's read, reminders about assignments and upcoming "evaluations."
  
  
• There's an online discussion board which his students use to post reactions to readings, pose questions, and sometimes make light of their academic endeavors. (That's not publicly accessible.)
  
  
• There's a Moodle section where he posts readings, his notes, links to audio and visual resources (like Thomas Friedman on Globalization), the official AP outline, sample test questions, and writing guides.
  
  
• The right side of the Moodle page contains news feeds from The Economist and BBC World News. Headlines for course-related articles appear there and are links to the articles. These news feeds are automatically updated many times a day.
  
  
• There's a categorized collection of very helpful web links that's not so large as to be overwhelming.
  
  
• There's an e-mail link so students can get in touch easily.
  
  
• Oh, and there's a count-down showing how many days remain until the AP exam.

It's a fine model.

If you want a new teaching tool:

1. Decide how a web page or a collection of them could help you teach.
   
   
2. Decide what should be on a web page to do those things.
   
   
3. Recruit some skilled students or colleagues who are sensitive to the academic and public relations demands for such a site and get their help in putting the things you want on the web. (But, don't let the excited, technically competent advisors add every bell and whistle possible. Sometimes they are distractions.)
   
   
4. Check with tech support in your school or district and find out if there are standards or formats you'll have to follow.
   
   
5. Have lots of people "proof read" the early drafts and respond to their reactions.

If you want ideas about design, I recommend you spend some time reading Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. You won't want or need to read the whole book, but you will recognize the things you ought to read as you plan a web site for your course.

PS: If I missed your course web site, let me know. I'll add it to the catalog.

---

Labels: pedagogy

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:40 AM