Prompt students with the following questions:
What information can one find on MY HERO?
How is that information generally organized?
What are the main navigation elements?
How are the stories organized?
What are the standard parts of every story?
What kind of variety exists in the story content?
(e.g., Where are the stories from? Who writes them? Why are people recognized as heroes? What kinds of things are important to heroes? What value choices do heroes make?)
Step One: Preparing the Handout of Questions (or use the Handout provided.)
Create a form with space for short answers to questions about the main elements and content of the MY HERO site. Use your own questions or choose from the following to get started. Note that some questions are very basic and the answers easily found, while others require actually scanning or reading stories for the answers.
Adapt the level of questions to match your students’ computer literacy skills.
Choose the number of questions based on the amount of time you have to spend on the computer looking for the answers.
Choose a mix of easy-to-answer questions and ones that require scanning or reading stories to find the answers.
Step Two: The Hunt is On!
Students log on to www.myhero.com and search for the answers to the Scavenger
Hunt questions, filling in the handout as they go along.
Step Three: Discussing the answers
You can have a straightforward question/answer session or you can turn it into a game as follows: (The game requires that there be more questions in the Scavenger Hunt, so that every student in the class has an opportunity to answer at least one question.)
If you have Internet-connected computers in the room, open up the MY HERO website. Otherwise you may want to copy several MY HERO pages to show the class what the pages contain and how the site is used. The most useful pages to copy include the home page, the main pages for Search, Create and the Directory, along with a sample story.
A. Number students 1-2-3-4, and have them divide into groups.
B. Ask each group in turn, calling on a different person in that group each time, to read the answer they found to a specific question. If the answer is correct, group gets 1 point.
If the answer is incorrect and no one else in the group can answer the question, it goes to the next group.
Whichever group answers the question correctly gets the point. After the correct answer has been given, discuss why there was a problem arriving at the answer, highlighting the process the winning individual went
through to find the correct answer.
C. The team with the most points wins. To reward the winning team, use the heroes they found interesting as
the first MY HERO stories to read together as a class.
