Technology Lesson Plan: Make a Class Squidoo Lens

My summer writing class is making a Squidoo lens. Maybe your class would like to do the same.

A Squidoo lens is, in the words of Squidoo, an "organized directory" of resources on a particular topic. We're doing 21st Century Skills, but you can choose any topic at all: the subject of your current unit or classroom theme, the main topic of the class for a grand end-of-year wrap-up, your students' favorite book, or perhaps a small sub-topic that's giving your students some trouble.

Squidoo lenses can include written sections, videos, links, pictures, maps, book reviews, and lots more. Making one is a great way to practice basic and intermediate computer skills (including simple html, use of user interfaces like dashboards, online research, and keyboard skills).

Here's what a Squidoo lens looks like:


Here's another:


Here's how to make one with your class:

• Go to Squidoo.com and sign up. You'll need to give an email address. I used my school email address and made the password the title of  the class so everyone could remember it and sign in.
• Set up a lens (that's what Squidoo calls pages) with enough modules (those are the sub-pages of a lens) for each class member to have one.
• Take your students to the computer lab. Help everyone log in. Have each student click "edit" next to a text module, put his or her name into it, and save it. This is the hardest part, but persevere. Everyone can log in at once, but you have to be careful not to have too many hitting the "save" button at the same time. If you skip the name part, you're likely to have students accidentally taking over each other's modules and undoing each other's work, an event which can lead to frustration.
• Divide the topic into sub-topics. We're doing 21st Century Skills, so we brainstormed a long list of essential skills for the 21st century, and each student chose one to write about.
  
• Have each student research and write his or her own module, so they can be graded separately. Depending on your class, you might choose to help the students learn to do their own formatting, or to follow them in and fix their formatting yourself.
  
• We're a writing class, so we're putting a lot of work into the prewriting and editing parts of the task. If you're a content course, you'll wan to put lots of effort into research and study of the topic, and let the lens be the final product. If you're a multi-subject class, this can be a long-term project looking at lots of different skills. This can also be a great cooperative project for mulltiple classrooms, whether to integrate many subjects, or to create a grand cumulative project for a department.
  
• Once you have your modules completed, get the class together to organize it and finish it up.
• You can then ask for feedback from the Squid Forum before you do your final edit and link it up from your class webpage.
  

Here's how a lens -- in fact, our lens -- looks while it's in progress.