P.E.

Learning About Communicable Disease Online

Content Area Standards

6.PCH.1.2 Differentiate between communicable diseases.

6.PCH.1.3 Recall symptoms associated with common communicable and chronic diseases.

6.PCH.1.4 Select methods of prevention based on the modes of transmission of communicable diseases

(see  here for full Standard Course of Study)

ISTE Standards:

(See here for full teacher-oriented standards)

• 1c. Promote student reflection through collaborative tools.
• 2a. Design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools.

Objectives:

Same as standards.

Technologies Employed

Center for Disease Control Website: Disease Database

(© Centers for Disease Control 2015: https://phil.cdc.gov/phil/home.asp)

Description: The Center for Disease Control maintains an online tool for exploring communicable diseases. This site styles the CDC a group of investigative super heroes combating disease villains. In general, this site tends to be too corny and verbose to use seriously with students. However, its database of common diseases provides a concise explanation for diseases, their histories, and their vectors. 

Rationale: This website provides students with access to the content needed in this lesson that is not readily available offline. Using this technology in the classroom will familiarize students with important sources of information on public health. 

Wikispaces

(© Wikispaces 2016. https://www.wikispaces.com/content/classroom)

Description: A wiki is an online publishing platform that presents users with a simple to use but powerful interface. Users can process and format text, embed images, embed sound, embed video, and present a wide variety of other media, with a minimum of coding experience. Multiple users can access and edit wikipages, but the wiki maintains an archive of all versions of the document, as well as a record of all changes. These tools make wikis ideal for group project work.

Rationale: My main technological objectives for this lesson focus around encouraging students to develop web etiquette and to learn how to collaborate in a digital space. Because wikis are designed for collaborative work, they will allow me to teach these objectives through digital activities. 

Venngage

Description: Venngage is a free online website that provides users with tools for creating infographics. 

Rationale: One important skill for students to learn is how to engage with an audience once they have learned useful material. The use of infographics is one way to leverage such a skill.

Materials and skills the teacher/classroom will need to complete this lesson:

• Devices with access to an internet browser and a word processing program (probably a laptop).
• Access to a reliable and secure network.
• Handouts describing the relevant diseases.
• Structured notes handout.

Description of Lesson

In this lesson, students will learn about common diseases and how they are communicated. They will then work together as a class to develop a wiki that will reflect the information they learn. Finally, each student will then create an infographic designed to spread awareness about health habits and how they relate to the epidemiological triangle (i.e. how contagions travel by vector to hosts, agents, and environments).

1. Identifying Diseases

For this project, the teacher will divide students into groups of 2-3 students and present each group with a handout detailing the symptoms of the diseases listed at the CDC website. Each group will be given 1-2 minutes to select a disease they would like to research.

At this point, the teacher will instruct students that they may take out their smartphones and use them to travel to the CDC website. At the same time, the teacher will hand out structured notes that provide a space for students to note the name, causes, symptoms, and vectors for each disease. Students will be given around 5-8 minutes to complete this work.

Once the groups have finished with this preliminary research, the teacher will introduce students to the class wiki. The teacher will explain that each group is going to create a wiki page that will present the information they just learned. The teacher will demonstrate how to create a hyper-linked wikipage on the wiki and verify that each group can do this. The teacher will then demonstrate how to embed an image and ask each group to embed the main image for their disease from the CDC. Again, the teacher will verify that each group can do this. This should take an additional 5-8 minutes.

The teacher will then instruct each group to write a short informative couple of paragraphs that will explain each section of the notes, and to post these on the wiki. As an additional requirement, each group should identify at least one difficult concept in each section and hyper-link words naming that concept to an explanatory external resource either at the CDC or at another site of their choosing. This should take around 20 minutes.

The teacher will use the last 10 minutes or so of the class presenting a short minilecture on how to use Venngage. Students will then create an infographic as a project to be completed over the next 2-3 days.