Wednesday, May 6, 2009

SHS: Why Is the Odyssey Important Today?


Werner Liepolt, English teacher at SHS, has engaged his 3 classes of freshmen English students in a thorough exploration of Homer's Odyssey. The essential question focused on the influence of the Odyssey on present day life. One final component of this multi-faceted unit engaged students in a research project that included Robin Stiles, library media specialist.

In this part of the study the students had to do a citation for a movie, a piece of art, and three articles. They had already watched the movie, Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? and viewed artwork in class. In the LMC students used the Internet Movie Database (imdb) website for information on the movie. They also used museum websites to find information on the artwork.

Since the students were freshmen they were asked to limit their searching to Ebsco or iConn for the articles and Robin went into great detail about citing the actual source of the article, not just the database that it appeared in.

Students used Noodlebib, part of Noodletools, to create and share note cards with tags.


Emphasis was placed on the building blocks of the research process, demonstrating that the better the organization, citations and notations, the easier the creation of the final paper. Students were told that this process would be very similar to that of their junior research paper.

Werner brought his 3 classes to the LMC once a week for 3 weeks. The students completed a short essay from their synthesized research. The classes were successful in learning some of the major building blocks for their research papers in the future.

[This post can not do justice to the many facets of this study, most of which occured in the classroom, but the rubrics, graphic organizers and assignments are available on Werner Liepolt's website.]

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