Web Corner
Learning adventures with Marco Polo
Nov 16, 2006 3:54 PM
Internet sources for lesson plans
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Marco Polo: Internet Content for the Classroom — www.marcopolo-education.org — is a rich Internet-based resource for educators that is a standards-based, discipline-specific Web site for K-12 teachers. It is loaded with lesson plans, worksheets and links to Web sites recommended for use in a K-12 educational environment. This is a flagship program of the Verizon Foundation and is dedicated to the integration of technology into classroom practices.
Professional development is a vital component of the Marco Polo program. The “train-the-trainer” model is extensive and the thousands of trainers have been instrumental in training more than 200,000 classroom teachers in more than 47 percent of United States school districts. (More than 19,000 teachers have been trained in our state alone.) The national Marco Polo program has enlisted content partners that include the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The state roll-out partners help align the content to state standards. The New York State Teacher Centers with the New York Institute of Technology are supporting the professional development and technology initiative of the program in our state.
Joe Pesavento, of the Mid-Hudson Teacher Center at SUNY New Paltz, pointed out that Marco Polo’s popularity has skyrocketed with more than 11 million hits and 96,000 unique visitors from more than 65 foreign countries. But, because the site is so vast, Pesavento recommends that New York State teachers stick with Marco Polo New York because the lesson plans posted there are aligned with the state’s standards.
There are several ways to reach the site, but Pesavento says the easiest is to go to http://www.nyiteez.org/MarcoPoloNY/.
Once at Marco Polo New York, go to the right-side navigation bar and click on one of the five subject areas under “aligned lessons.” For instance, click on ELA and you will see the four ELA standards and the grade levels from Pre-K to Grade 12 in the right-side navigation bar. Click on a grade level and you will be offered a list of grade-appropriate lessons aligned with the standards in reading, writing, listening and speaking.
Make a choice and then review the lessons that meet the standard available on the next screen. Once you select a lesson plan you can view the lesson details. (A new star rating tool promises to be useful in the future, especially if you can search for top-rated lessons within a subject.)
Another way to approach the search is by entering subject or key words and then backtrack to see how the lesson meets the standard. I tried to find something about sentences that would help students build more complex sentence structure in their writing. I searched for key words “sentences” and “sentence structure.” But the search results in the state site were not as rich as the results in the national Marco Polo site, where I found several lessons under “partner reviewed” content that dealt with the subject well. The lesson from the national site was not aligned with NYS standards, but that shouldn’t be a problem for experienced teachers who can do that on their own.
Marco Polo New York is a work in progress and is part of a continuing effort to help teachers integrate technology into the classroom. As a work in progress it is adding new features and the number of aligned lessons is expanding. However, if you rely on the Internet as a lesson plan resource, then you should have several other sites in your lesson plan tool belt [see box at left].
Catalino Fortino of the UFT Teacher Center, who is the Marco Polo State Training Coordinator, says that even though using Marco Polo is relatively easy, it’s a good idea to participate in professional development when users can learn the ins and outs of the Web site. The training can be tailored to regional, district or school needs. She encourages teachers who are interested in using Marco Polo to contact her at marcopolo@ufttc.org about upcoming training sessions and how schools or districts can enroll.
