Artifact 3

The Modern Fashion and Invention Activity was designed as a lesson to help students not only become familiar with creating web pages, but to also build on their writing skills and foster creative thinking in the classroom. The activity allows the students to create an article of fashion or a new invention from a “normal” object. The student must then write an advertisement for the object, take pictures of the object using a digital camera, and then create a web page in order to publish their work. This activity was fostered in my Integrating Media and Technology into Instruction class, and we used Netscape Composer to produce the web pages. One other classmate and I were partnered together to do the project.

Impact:

This activity is basically used to give students a good example of what you want them to do in a similar activity. You can use this activity to show students how to make web pages. You could also concentrate on the writing portion of the assignment and talk about how the media influences us with the words they say and the images that they show. By allowing the students to create their own product an advertise it, they are being exposed to the decisions that people must make everyday in order to advertise products.

Alignment:

By doing this activity, students will meet various technology standards for both subject specific standards and general technology standards. (Tech. Comp. III.A.) Some of the technology standards that the students will meet include:

Also, by creating the “Student Page” page of the web site, students are able to see an example of how to manage the technology that they are working with. (Tech. Comp. II.D.) A good example allows students the foundation to work and then expand on the original ideas and make their own creations quite individualized.

The students are assigned a partner to do this activity. A partner ensures that each pair of students is able to have access to a computer at all times. Doing this activity in partners also helps students understand more about sharing and how to more wisely manage their time since only one of them can be on a computer at a time (Tech. Comp. II.E.). This approach to learning develops cooperation with the students' fellow peers and it develops critical thinking when students must make their own decisions as to who can use the computer when. It is also an activity that fosters creativity due to the fact that students are creating an object that has not ever been created before. Although they can draw from their previous experiences with the objects that they come into contact with, they must be somewhat creative to design a completely new product and then explain its benefits (Tech. Comp. III.C. and INTASC Standard 4).