Spring 1998
Course Syllabus

The world presents itself to us in wonderful complexity, in whole systems of interrelated ideas and forces. Schools, on the other hand, often look at the world through only one window at a time, neatly segmenting it into subject matter compartments.

This course will teach you how to develop learning experiences that involve multiple subjects, multiple teachers, multiple students learning together with the help of multiple technologies. It will focus particular attention on the most exciting technology now becoming available to schools: the World Wide Web. Thinking skills development will also be stressed.

Objectives

Upon completing this course, you'll be able to:

1. Design a complete unit that involves two or more traditional content areas and two or more teachers.
2. Use the World Wide Web as a means of locating resources and ideas for your own teaching.
3. Design and develop an inquiry-based activity which will guide your students in exploring and using information on the Internet.
4. Create documents describing your unit design and post them on the World Wide Web.

Readings

There are two required books for the course available at the bookstore:

Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Design and Implementation, Heidi H. Jacobs (Ed.), ASCD, 1989.

Interdisciplinary Inquiry in Teaching and Learning, Marian Martinello & Gillian Cook, Merrill, 1994.

Course Schedule

Grading

Your final grade will be determined by your performance on several projects:

Project 1: A Short-term Webquest. Weight = 30%

As practice for developing complete interdisciplinary units on the web, you will locate and organize existing web sites on a specific topic, and design an interesting task around those sites. The end result will be a web document that would engage your students in pursuit of information and understanding for one or two class periods. This can be a group or solo project, due April 1.

Project 2: Web-Based Interdisciplinary Unit. Weight = 60%

The final project is an interdisciplinary unit that will involve students for at least five class periods. At least two content areas will be involved, and a major component of the unit will involve students looking for information on the World Wide Web. Non-web and non-technology based resources may also be involved as appropriate. The unit will be documented in enough detail so that another teacher could pick it up and implement it without ever meeting you face to face. Your deliverable will contain the following parts:

• Introduction/overview for the teacher.
• Lesson plans for individual classes
• Any handouts or files needed by the students

All documentation about the unit will be submitted as web pages and will be posted to the web for use by other teachers. This group project is due on May 13.

Course participation. Weight = 10%

Active participation is important for a variety of reasons; most important is that through actively participation, you will learn the material more deeply. In EdTec 596 we will encourage all students to contribute to the weekly discussions both in small group and large group formats. Contributions to the electronic forum will also be considered as a participation factor.

This is a graduate level course. Please keep in mind the following definitions of grading standards from the SDSU Graduate Catalog:

A = Outstanding achievement; available only for the highest accomplishment
B = Praiseworthy performance; definitely above average
C = average; awarded for satisfactory performance...

The bottom line is this: A's are reserved for exemplary performance that goes beyond expectations.