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Adventures in Cybercamp
Candace Goldstein, a teacher in Orange, New Jersey, shares her story about Cybercamp, a special technology summer camp, and the benefits of using techology within the curriculum. By Candace Goldstein |
 he Internet
and its relevance to education are hot topics these days. The Internet's impact
on society is undeniable. As educators, we have begun to see
the Web as a valuable tool in our efforts to prepare children to meet
their potential.
In the summer of 1997, the Orange public school system in New Jersey embarked on an exciting journey to explore the possibilities of utilizing the Internet for instruction. As part of the district's technology initiative, a free summer camp called Cybercamp was established that focused on the Internet. The idea was to introduce Internet skills coupled with curriculum enrichment. That first year, the camp serviced 750 children from grades four through 12. Now in its second season, Cybercamp has proved to be a success. |
 range is
located in Central New Jersey. The district serves an urban population; and is
included in what is known as New Jersey's "special needs districts." These are
districts that have been identified by the state as having a substantially lower
local tax base than the state average.
The program is financed by a Goals 2000 grant received by the district. Goals 2000 is a competitive federal grant which funds systemic educational reform. For Cybercamp, the grant provides money for teacher and administration computer training, curriculum development, stipends to pay the staff, as well as for promoting the district's partnership with Seton Hall University. |
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he camp is
located at 14 sites, including one at each of the district's seven elementary
school computer labs, four at the middle school, and three at the high school.
This year the high school sessions have combined with a summer youth employment
program run by the district. The high school's Cybercamp concentrates on teaching
work skills along with introducing Internet usage. High school students are also
employed in the other sites as teacher's assistants.
The curriculum at each of the elementary sites is based on a theme. The teacher picks an area of interest and builds around it. This year some of the themes include Cyber-safari, World Travel, Castles Around the World, African-American Mosaic, Cruising Cultures, and A Walk in the Clouds. All of the teachers have gone through a 35 hour college level course on the use of the Internet and Microsoft Office. The course is run by professors from a local university, Seton Hall. This training is currently being provided to the staff in the entire district. The teachers report that training is a key element to the success of this program. The use of the Internet is considered a springboard to teaching curriculum skills at Cybercamp. As a special education teacher, it interests me to explore the Internet as a tool to aid my students with learning disabilities. Two areas in which the Web adds particular advantages are aiding students in focusing ability and organizational skills. |
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"The sights
and sounds offered by the graphics on the Internet help the child to locate
the information needed. After the necessary details are filtered out,
the student is able to focus on completion of the task."
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 very teacher
knows that instruction is impossible unless the student
is able to zero in on the lesson. To many children with learning disabilities,
this is a monumental task. With all the stimuli coming in at once, it is difficult
to quickly filter the information that is most relevant to the task. It's sort of
like trying to listen for your train being announced in a subway station as
another train whizzes by, a street musician plays, and your map blows away. These
students benefit from being able to channel all their senses into a specific
task. The computer provides a platform that enables this to happen. The child
must use sight, touch, and many times hearing as they go through software
programs.
In my experience, the Internet takes this one step further. It opens a way for the child to take in information at his/her own pace. The sights and sounds offered by the graphics on the Internet help the child to locate the information needed. After the necessary details are filtered out, the student is able to focus on completion of the task. Teaching focusing ability using the Internet is easier said than done, however. I have my students keep site journals as they work on a project. At the end of a session, students share what they have discovered with the other children. |
 will never
forget the day when one of my students with severe
articulation problems shared with the class a Web site he had discovered. He
seldom spoke in a group, but was so excited about what he had uncovered that he
forgot about his disability and gave an enthusiastic report to the other students.
This same child ran for student council the next year, made a speech in front of
his entire grade, and won! Of course, the experience in Cybercamp is not
completely responsible for his new-found confidence; however, any opportunity for
students to experience success is valuable.
When introducing new sites, I have found it helpful to have the addresses printed on index cards. The students can create their own "site bank" by storing the cards in a box. They pull the URL out as needed. As more addresses are added to the box, students can classify them by organizing the cards into topics using index card dividers. Having them on cards makes it easier for students to copy as they type in the address. WebQuests are also a wonderful mechanism to aid students in focusing in on the task at hand. WebQuests concentrate on a specific concept. Tasks are given and Web sites are provided as links to fulfill the lesson's objective. There are more and more WebQuests available over the Internet, or you can create your own. I have also found that projects, especially combined with graphic aids, are a wonderful way to keep students focused. Projects can be simple, like a treasure hunt comprised of questions whose answers come from various sites, or more complex, like national and international projects set up over the Web. Research projects are also a common way to introduce technology's uses to students. |
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"When integrated
into the classroom curriculum, the Internet provides students with ready
access to information as they become actively involved in their learning
process. Students develop research skills as they navigate through links
to gather, organize, and present information."
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 owever, asking a child
with organizational difficulty to do a research paper is
like asking most people to run a marathon. Their first reaction is "How
do I start?" To students with difficulty organizing information, this
is an important question. The Internet allows them to respond instead with:
"Let's start here and see how I can get where I want to go." Since there
are a number of avenues to reach the same information using Internet
searching, some of the frustration of finding the right source is
eliminated. If the assignment is to write about events of the Revolutionary War
that took place in New Jersey, the student has many options. He/she can search:
Revolutionary War, New Jersey, George Washington, or any other related subjects.
Eventually, the student will find information. Students could try this in a
conventional library, but with nowhere near the speed. The speed of the Internet
cuts down on the child's frustration.
This year, the children in the African-American Mosaic section of Cybercamp took a unique approach to their research using the Web. They had been assigned to get information concerning an African-American leader. The group decided to create a timeline with the biographies they had created through their research. They printed out their information. By the end of the camp, the timeline stretched from one end of the hall to the other. The students then decided to create a trivia game using the biographies. Everyone who visited the class got to participate in the class project through the trivia game. It wasn't your traditional research paper, but as Cybercamp teacher Marisa Cohen observed: "The Internet is a wonderful resource tool for the classroom teacher. When integrated into the classroom curriculum, the Internet provides students with ready access to information as they become actively involved in their learning process. Students develop research skills as they navigate through links, to gather, organize, and present information. The most wonderful feature of the Internet is that there are no time or place constraints." |
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o facilitate
Internet research, teachers must spend time teaching children how to search.
With younger students, I start by using
Yahooligans, Lycos Kids,
or any of the search engines or directories that are set up for children. Graphic
aids are a tremendous benefit when helping students organize their thoughts to
get them on paper. Aids that break the task down into concrete steps of
arranging information are valuable to all students, but are essential to those
with difficulty organizing. As the children become more proficient doing
searches, you can introduce more advanced search methods with more sophisticated
search engines. This is one area in which practice is necessary. Fortunately,
the students are learning curriculum skills as they practice Web research.
Taking the focus off of having to go to the "right" answer, by teaching children
how to effectively search, relieves much of the frustration so frequently
experienced by students with organizational difficulties.
In Cybercamp, I begin teaching children to do research using the Web by assigning them an imaginative story to write. The only requirement is that they base the story on information they find on the Internet, and do a copy and paste of the information into their story. I also explain how to reference the URL. Last summer I asked the group of students to write their own adventure stories. I got wonderful stories of various lengths about such things as dinosaurs, haunted houses, and lost bookbags. One twelve-year-old boy in the camp had recently immigrated from Haiti with his family. He was able to read English well, but had more limited speaking abilities. This child loved poetry. I had given him some poetry sites to read. His favorite site contained poems by Langston Hughes. When I gave the assignment, he asked if he could write about his adventure of moving to the the United States. I wholeheartedly agreed, but was curious to see how he would relate it to the Web research. What he did was astonishing. He wrote a beautiful poem about what it felt like to be different. He used Langston Hughes' poem "A Negro Speaks of Rivers" as his tie with the Web. Poetry spoke to him, and he used it to speak to others. |
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course, regardless of the intended topic of research, safety is often
the first issue raised by educators and parents when dealing with the
use of the Internet by children. It is an essential topic to address,
especially with an Internet-focused program like Cybercamp. A district-
wide acceptable use policy is an absolute must for any school with Web
access. There are excellent acceptable
use policies available on the Internet. Once the acceptable use
policy is adopted by the district, strict adherence is necessary. Teachers
and administrators should explain the consequences of not sticking to
the rules. Personally, I would never let a child on the Internet without
a policy signed by their parents. With an acceptable use policy in place, the next step is to consistently emphasize the rules with the children. We regularly teach our students to stay away from strangers and drugs; it is also important to teach Internet safety. Rules such as the following need to be reinforced constantly:
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 any
districts
elect to employ filters or firewalls. Filters are
software loaded onto individual computers that block sites containing
specific words that may be offensive. The problem is that valuable
information can also be blocked. For example, I live in the county of
Essex. I cannot access information about my county using most filters
because of the inclusion of "sex" in the word. A firewall is software
for your network which routes all the information through a central point that
controls access to the documents. You can program firewalls more easily than
filters to fit your network's needs. Even with these protections, however,
nothing can substitute for guidance from teachers and parents. Using the
Internet
requires direct, hands-on teaching.
The fact is that there are millions of sites available, and only a small percentage of them are inappropriate for children. The majority are sources of valuable information. The teacher must place instruction on Internet safety as a high priority, so that students can utilize the valuable sites. |
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"The children
went beyond surfing the Internet to assimilating the knowledge into
presentable form."
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n addition to
safety precautions, a reality of using the Internet as a part of a lesson is that
previewing is a must. You may have the class all primed and ready to
explore a topic using some fantastic Web sites you have found. However, when
logging onto the Internet, you get the all too familiar message telling you the
server is down. Time for the backup plan.
A similar situation arises when a Web site you planned is taken off the Internet. This happens many times with sites that have smaller sponsors. They often have a more limited time to be active on the Web. Sites with larger sponsors have the ability to change and update frequently. This is desirable, except when you have a lesson planned around a particular part of the site. Many times these sites are moved from one address on the server to another; you can find your Web page in the site's archives. The lesson here is to preview, then preview again. |
 nother aspect
of using the Internet is downloading. Downloading is a wonderful feature of the
Internet. Downloading involves
loading a program from the Internet onto your personal computer. Need the
latest version of Netscape? Just go to the
Netscape homepage and download it! A word of caution: do not download unless
your computer is equipped with an anti-virus program. A virus is a program
within a program that causes damage to your computer. You run the risk of
unknowingly downloading a virus from the Web unless you have virus protection.
Once you begin using the Internet, staying current with Web sites is a challenge. Listservs can help in this area. Listservs are services that send you lists of current Internet information over your e-mail. A listserv focuses in on a specific topic of interest. It is easy to use and it's free to register to receive the listserv and just as easy to cancel a subscription. You can find a directory of educational listservs at E-mail Discussion Lists. In addition, many of the larger Web sites allow you to register to receive e-mailed updates pertaining to their site. This can help as you prepare your lessons. |
 ou
can also find useful URLs in the various Internet Yellow Pages books
that are available commercially. I spend time looking at the layout
of the book before I purchase it. I look for those books geared specifically
toward education. Some offer a rating of the sites, which is a big help
when choosing URLs for lessons. The Encyclopedia Britannica also posts an Internet
guide which classifies the sites by topics and rates them. This year the students in the Castles Around the World section of the camp created their own questionnaire to survey what the students liked most about Cybercamp. They devised a 1-5 point rating system. The highest rating was given to learning to use the Internet in conjunction with other programs. They enjoyed using Power Point to make presentations explaining what they learned in camp. Using Word, they wrote booklets to preserve the information they had gathered. They also made graphs in Excel to exemplify some of the data they gathered using the Web. The children went beyond surfing the Internet to assimilating the knowledge into presentable form. |
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he teachers unanimously commented on the effectiveness of the Internet
to bring the curriculum to life. As capsulized by Fay Mohammed, a Cybercamp
teacher, "This program enhances the mind of a child in many ways. It
brings the learning to life for a child. Children gain a better
understanding of many things which they have heard in classrooms, seen,
and read in books."
Cybercamp is constantly evolving. From year to year, we learn about the bumps in the road and the best routes to follow as we responsibly open the information highway to children. The objective is to make the Internet more and more relevant to everyday life and learning. Next year we will expand on the lessons learned in this year's Cybercamp, as together the teachers and students search for innovative ways to explore that highway. |
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