After the chaos of the stock market game we have floated into the calm waters of the Internet research unit. You might think that Internet research would be a troubling and risky project with fourth and fifth grade students, but it actually goes quite smoothly. They get to choose their own topic, subject to my approval. Many of them choose predictable things like football players or spider monkeys or Walt Disney or the care of hamsters, but we get the occasional interesting one like D-Day or knights or the sinking of the Titanic. They spend three weeks doing the research, using a variety of sources like Wikipedia and Google searches, while we discuss Internet safety and how to evaluate web sources. My favorite strategy here is using the Pacific tree octopus site as an object lesson.
Then they take their notes and make them into a PowerPoint presentation. The whole thing takes six or seven class periods, but it holds their interest because they chose their own topic. It works well for students of different abilities, who get as far as they are able, and it works well as a peg for hanging discussions about Internet safety and good research strategies. Now if I could just discourage the one girl who is determined to study Hello Kitty cellphones...

I'm having a lot of trouble getting a lesson right. At least my kids are having trouble and I'm troubled because they're struggling with something that shouldn't be so hard. Clearly I'm asking them to do too much all at once, but I thought that it wasn't. Let me explain. We're playing the stock market game, the fifth graders and I. I give them a pretend million dollars to invest and they choose companies, look up the starting prices and figure out how many shares they are buying. They have three weeks to set it up, with three forty-five minute class periods.
We're using Excel to set up their choices. At the top they put the title and their name. So far, so good. Below that they need a header row to label the five columns. The first column is the name of the company. Most of them choose between three and five companies, because I strongly encourage that. The second column is for the stock symbol, which they look up at finance.google.com. That pretty much gets us through the first week, what with all the confusion about making the title large enough. They've used Excel before, but not lately, and it can be tough to work with large text that slops over from one box into another. I show them how to resize the columns to make the text fit, but it remains one of the most confusing features of Excel.
Next we get into the heavy duty arithmetic. They have to take their million dollars and divide it into equal portions for each company. This should be a simple division problem for them, and no sweat for our fifth graders, but there's something about a million that seems a bit abstract to them. When I rephrase the question into a hundred dollars and buying five shirts they get it right away. Once they get that step they've got to look up the starting price of each share, and here's another place where we lose some people. There's nothing complicated about going to the website and entering the symbol. I think they are just overwhelmed by the complexity of the total task at this point. Going back and forth between the browser and Excel, remembering which company they are looking up, getting the price, putting it into the proper box in Excel. It is too much for some of them, especially the slower learners. Each step is simple but there are too many steps. And we haven't even gotten to the part about dividing the total amount for that company by the starting price to find out how many shares we can buy. That's the big task for the third week, and many of them are daunted by it.
The pictures are optional of course. They give the clever children, the ones who grasp the task quickly, something to do while the others work it through. I still think the unit is worth doing, but I'm not sure. If I could find a better framework for an Excel unit I would abandon this. But I like the fact that it's based on real-world numbers, that it uses math they already know how to do, and that there's scope for creativity and individual variation. And at the end of the year I calculate who did the best and announce the winners for each class. So there's that little incentive to do the best. For the record, I chose Apple, Cisco, Canadian National RR, and the Four Seasons Hotels. Let's see whether I can beat out my students.

Have you ever noticed that our kids don’t use computers in the same way that we do? Most of us read our e-mail, do a little shopping, read the headline news, write a lesson plan or a letter to parents, and think we’ve gotten good value from our computer. For many kids the computer is different. It’s a toy, part of their entertainment world, along with the TV and the iPod and the cell phone. What are they playing on it? There is a whole world of games out there that most of us don’t know anything about. Believe me, I had never run across some of these until I did a little research.
The younger kids love the pet sites, like Neopets and Club Penguin. These let you adopt a pet, buy food and toys for it, play games with it -- all in the virtual world of course. You can send messages to other pet owners; an important component of these sites is the social interaction. You can spend real money on gear like shirts and stuffed animals. There are chat filters and online moderators to keep it safe. Although sticky-sweet, these sites are fun for pre-teens and I would allow a child of the proper age to use them.
The game arcades are very popular and kids quickly find out about them from other kids. These include Pogo, Candystand, Shockwave, and Yahooligans games. They have all kinds of games: racing, action, jigsaws, word puzzles, sports, even cerebral games like chess. Some of them are heavily gender-stereotyped. Guess who is supposed to play Packet Racer versus Carrie the Caregiver? These stereotyped games might limit the boys more than the girls. I’ve seen girls playing the racing games but I’ve never seen a boy pretending to manage babies in a maternity ward. In any case, these game arcade sites are pretty harmless, although they do carry ads. Children quickly learn not to click on the ads, but like the rest of us they are probably influenced by the messages.
Back when I was a kid I would have loved the virtual worlds like Millsberry. You get a whole city to explore with your avatar. You design your house, buy furniture for it, play games, go to the museum, play music, and more. All pretend. It’s like practicing to be an adult without having to actually drive around and pay the bills. It seems pretty harmless, even though the virtual theatre shows ads for General Mills cereals. At least that supports the site.
The other kind of game I would have loved is the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game). World of Warcraft is the big one, but Runescape is more aimed at younger players. It’s a fantasy world where you explore, meet other characters, fight monsters, and keep your character alive and healthy. It’s free, although paid subscribers get more gear and go on better quests. The complexity is a bit intimidating for young children. You need to eat and drink, buy supplies and weapons, learn to fight. Children under thirteen are not supposed to set up an account and are encouraged to play along with their parents.
I could go on and on with this list. Habbo Hotel, Sherwood Dungeon, Faketown, the Virtual Magic Kingdom (guess who sponsors that one?)... The cyberworld is full of things for kids to play. No wonder you never see kids out on the streets any more. They're all inside glued to the little screens.

We're back from the holiday break. I wish I were feeling refreshed and energized, but I'm not. Even the thought of coping with the computer club this afternoon doesn't get my blood stirring. Those kids in the club have energy to spare. They run into the lab just as the afternoon bell rings, pounce on their favorite computers, and plunge into their favorite activity -- changing the desktop backgrounds. I keep my backgrounds stable on my five work and home computers because they remind me which computer I'm working on. The kids like to change their desktops to reflect their moods, their current passions, and some weird thing that somebody else found on Google Images. The boys are particularly fond of doctored pictures of animals -- a kitten holding a gun (which I won't allow. No guns!), evil squirrels, that sort of thing. After getting the picture just right they rip into the project of the week. Currently they're making web pages with Dreamweaver. No problem there, except that they keep pestering me to let them include music and video clips. I keep explaining the finer points of copyright law but it is not making an impression. We might start publishing the pages this week, at least for the kids who remembered to return their permission slip from their parents.