DESIGNING INTERNET ASSIGNMENTS
By Dr. Martha E. Beagle

Another school year is upon us, and with a new year, we look for new and innovative ways to engage our students in the learning process. As teachers we find it a challenge in how to use the learning opportunities presented by the World Wide Web. Our classrooms are connected and our students are savvy and clever Internet surfers. We are always looking for ways to get our students online and enhance what we are already doing in our classrooms. One good way to do that is to design Internet assignments, also known as web assignments.

STANDARDS FOR DESIGNING AN INTERNET ASSIGNMENT

TYPES OF INTERNET ASSIGNMENTS

The possibilities are infinite. A good Internet assignment helps to focus students on an idea or ideas that is/are important to the course and curriculum. The student becomes the information discoverer, examiner, and hunter of answers to worthwhile questions and topics. The assignment should ask questions that take students in uncommon approaches, using an array of scholarly activities. Students should be challenged to confront the specifics, evaluate the disparities, derive inferences, and clarify the solutions. It may be designed so that there is more than one answer to some of the questions and students may end up in different places. The key is that new learning occurs.

Reading Assignments
The Internet can be used in numerous ways to assist reading assignments. A web site can be developed and readings posted on it. Links to readings can be provided that can be found on the Internet or simply provide your students with the exact Internet addresses. Some libraries now host e-reserves that make published documents and texts easily available through the Internet.

Research Assignments
Research assignments require students to find and review information pertinent to a topic. Assignments may require your students to find and/or review text, statistics, non-print information reserves, primary sources and documents, laboratory results, explanations, or other kinds of information. Library research assistance can be helpful in preparing and designing research assignments, as well as providing support for your students and the research process.

Writing Assignments
Teachers utilize writing assignments to encourage their students to think logically about topics, concepts, and practices taught within a course. After all, it is challenging to write without reasoning. Depending upon the type, writing can require higher level thought – synthesizing, evaluating, and documenting – and sometimes requiring research to find pertinent information and data. Peer review can be incorporated with a mixture of participants. Web site publishing and communication tools introduces a range of experiences for encouraging the improvement of student writing and rationalizing skills.

Problem Solving Assignments
These types of assignments allow teachers to create possibilities for their students to relate acquired course material and knowledge to real challenges. These assignments may take on the mode of case studies, seminars, problem sets, or reproductions. The primary characteristic of this assignment is that the student must use the expertise and abilities learned to connect with a circumstance, problem, or event.

TIPS FOR INCREASING LEARNING THROUGH INTERNET ASSIGNMENTS

To help improve Internet teaching, here are some suggestions for getting more out of your Internet assignments.

1. Allow for student choice on Internet assignments
   Design Internet assignments that allow students a variety of options about the topics they research. Students will feel some ownership to the project and thus more motivated.
2. Go beyond fact finding on Internet assignments
   Develop tasks that expect students to shape opinions about the information that they find on the Internet. Equally weigh the facts found and the opinions or arguments developed from this.
3. Require peer to peer interaction on Internet assignments
   Ask students to share information with one another. Lessons should be structured that collapse the assignment tasks into isolated pieces, forcing students into roles that make them accountable in completing the assignment.
4. Reverse roles with your students
   Challenge your students to teach you something that is new to you and the topic of the assignment. Allowing your students to take on the role of teacher, they must now be able to track down new information and also be able to clarify the material in an articulate approach. The more questions you can ask as the teacher, the more they need to strengthen their information.

The World Wide Web provides many opportunities to introduce new ways of supporting individual learning styles of our students and creates new prototypes of instruction. In order for our students to critically use the web, we must familiarize ourselves with good practices of judicious Internet use, and then endorse those practices by example and mentoring.

Web based assignments are here to stay. They relate to an increasingly important form of articulation; they have a significant motivational worth; they allow sharing of students' work with other students; they connect more directly to reference sources that are also on the Internet; and they offer a variety of innovative means of articulation. The challenge will be for us as teachers to set assignment expectations that encourage the most intellectually useful aspects of the Internet.

Some examples of websites that have Internet assignments:

• Woodrow Wilson Middle School, Middletown, CT
• HOTCHALK Lesson Plan Page
• The Classroom (physical education link)
• A list of 15 web quests - Best WebQuests
• PE Central’s Physical Education Program Websites
• Teacher Tap: Health and Physical Education

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