The Category Creator: An Interactive Online Gallery for Bridging Student-Generated Artifacts and Whole-Classroom Reflection

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: Advanced Technologies for Learning Poster Session

Abstract

The Category Creator (CC) is an interactive gallery for digital artifacts. It was developed as part of a design-based research project that builds work in classroom connectivity (Hegedus & Moreno-Armella, 2009; Stroup et al., 2002) to bridge two classroom practices: student-centered construction activities (e.g. Papert, 1980), and community-centered discussion about themes emerging from those activities (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994; Yackel & Cobb, 1996). In this poster, I describe the motivation, theory, and design of CC and review how 6th, 7th, and 8th graders identified emergent content-related (and non-content related) themes within CC during a mathematics lesson on fractals. My goals are to share emerging instructional implications of this work; and obtain feedback during a particularly generative period in CC’s development.

Author

• Michelle Hoda Wilkerson-Jerde, Tufts University