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Major Project

A major goal of this course is to create a final project as a culminating activity. For this project, you will construct an educational website making use of one or more of the advanced technologies we explore, such as streaming multimedia, web-enabled databases or a courseware management system. You may construct the project resource using any combination of tools you wish to use. The project will be most useful to you if you incorporate content that is relevant to your instructional environment, e.g. resources for third-grade mathematics. As you create the website, try both to leverage your existing knowledge (e.g., of whatever HTML authoring tools you are familiar with) and to "push the envelope" by incorporating newly learned skills.

This project website may be either an individual effort, or a small-group project with one or more collaborating classmates. A collaboratively constructed project will likely be more extensive and elaborate than an individual project. Whether yours is an individual or a group project, you are expected to work actively with classmates to share ideas, suggestions and critiques in all phases of the project.

To help you complete this project in the short time available, work is broken down into seven phases leading you from initial planning to a final in-class presentation. Overall, the intent is to help you create a site that is useful to you, that builds from a solid theoretical base in educational technology, that demonstrates attention to learner needs and pedagogical goals, and that incorporates advanced features.

Phase 1 - Project proposal (WebBoard posting). Due Friday, June 8. Post a one-page (two-to-four paragraph) description of the project you propose to complete in this course. If this builds on an existing resource, link to that as well. In C-Base, provide a link to your WebBoard post as Project Assignment 1.

Phase 2 - Comments on two project proposals (WebBoard posting). Due Monday, June 11. Choose two of your classmates' proposals to respond to. Offer constructive critiques, guidance about relevant resources, etc. Select project proposals that either no one else, or just one other person, has responded to so far. (This will ensure that everyone will benefit from two classmates' feedback.) In C-Base, provide a link to your WebBoard responses as Project Assignment 2.

Phase 3 - Project proposal as a web page. Due Friday, June 15. Revise your project proposal in light of the feedback you have received. Construct a web page describing your project. Link this proposal to your ePortfolio web page. Post a link to your proposal in the class WebBoard so that others may see it. In C-Base, provide a link to your page as Project Assignment 3.

Phase 4 - A draft version of your project website. Due Tuesday, June 19. Post a link to the site in WebBoard. In C-Base, provide a link to the website as Project Assignment 4.

Phase 5 - Further work on the project website, in collaboration with classmates. Ongoing in Weeks 3 and 4. Seek others' ideas, whether or not yours is a group project. Make use of a range of resources to facilitate this collaboration - WebBoard synchronous and asynchronous conferences, email, the phone, etc. In C-Base, provide a two-to-four-paragraph description of how you are collaborating, as Project Assignment 5, by Friday, June 22.

Phase 6 - Final project website. Aim to complete the actual project website by Monday, June 25. By Wednesday, June 27, post a thorough description in the WebBoard about what your project is, and what you have learned from it. Include a link to your final project website in this discussion. In C-Base, provide a link to the final project website as Project Assignment 6.

Phase 7 - Final presentation. You may choose to present your work to the class either during a synchronous session in WebBoard on Friday, June 29, or during our face-to-face meeting on Saturday morning, June 30. Friday presentations will be round-robin style, with one presenter after another and a chance for comments and questions between presentations; each Friday presentation will be 3 to 5 minutes long. Saturday presentations will take the form of a Presentation Fair - each student will have 1 to 2 minutes to introduce their project website to the whole class, after which there will be four twenty-minute blocks at multiple workstations. During each of these blocks, about 1/4 of the day's presenters will demonstrate and discuss their project sites for the rest of the class and for audience members.