It was the mid-1990s and I was standing in a third grade classroom when a shriek burst forth from one of the smallest girls in the room. She was standing by the only computer in the room, pointing to the small screen.

            “It’s Mr. Morrison,” she called out, and students rushed forward to crowd around the computer. They jostled one another to get a better look. “He sent us mail.”

            Mr. Morrison was a science teacher at the city’s middle school but he owned a house in Costa Rica, and on academic sabbatical, Mr. Morrison was doing research on the migration of Monarch butterflies. Before he left the country, however, he made contact with various elementary school teachers and students, and he regularly emailed them updates on his adventures and his research into the butterflies. Students used this information as data for their own understanding of science.

            As a newspaper reporter covering education for a major newspaper in Western Massachusetts, I experienced one of those singular moments when the merging of technology and education suddenly seemed like a true possibility. The excitement generated by a few lines of text was undeniable and it was clear that technology had the capacity to break down geographic lines.

Suddenly, for these students, Costa Rica wasn’t so far away.

Flash forward to the end of my first year of teaching after ten years as a newspaper journalist. Five of those years as a reporter had been spent writing about schools, going into classrooms throughout our region and meeting with teachers and, more importantly, with students. I had been so inspired by what I wrote about in the classrooms that I decided to become a teacher myself, and now I had my own classroom in a suburban town in Western Massachusetts.

My educational philosophy then, and now, is to engage the critical thinking skills of my students through active participation in projects, and the exploration of collaborative ideas – such as Weblogs, pen pals, digital storytelling, Wiki story writing and others – have been a natural extension of this approach to teaching.

 Jump ahead to 2002, and I am exhausted by my first year of teaching and developing my own writing program for sixth graders, but I enroll in the Western Massachusetts Writing Project Summer Institute. As part of the National Writing Project, the WMWP summer program brings together a group of teachers for four weeks of writing, workshops, research and collaboration.

Although we have full access to the computer lab at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, most of us are using the machines as glorified word processors until Paul Oh, the technology liaison for the writing project, shows us two Internet-based tools.

One is something called the e-Anthology and it is a website that allows participants in all of the National Writing Project’s sites throughout the country to post their personal writing for others to see, and more importantly, the site allows the writer to receive comments, criticism and reflection from distant writers. At the touch of a button, hundreds of teacher-writers were suddenly connected in an electronic web of collaboration.

The second tool we were shown is a Weblog, which was still an unrecognizable name for most of us. Blogs had not yet become the tool of political grandstanding or personal diaries. Blogs were still on the outer fringe of popular culture. The Weblog was a space where we could share our writing and research projects and workshop materials with each other, and we were soon interacting with each other in very different ways. At the Summer Institute, we had been broken down into small reading response groups. The Weblog allowed us to expand the net of our reading response groups to include everyone on the site. The level of collaboration increased tenfold as we became comfortable with the technology.

I immediately wondered about the application for Weblogs in my sixth grade writing classroom, and I was able to get the National Writing Project to allow me a Weblog on their server space. Over the course of three years, my classroom Weblog has become a very active source of student writing and interaction. They are posting stories, reflections, comments and various technology projects (such as PowerPoint shows and Publisher documents and audio files). The Weblog has connected parents and family members to the work of my students and the inner workings of what is going on in my classroom. Students have learned about hyperlinks, web design and other facets of technology that will help situate them in this ever-changing world of computers.

One example of how I am incorporating the Weblog into my sixth grade classroom as a collaborative tool is as a brainstorming device for a month-long unit on theater writing and puppet performance. Students work in cooperative groups to write, produce and perform original puppet shows that are all connected by the use of an imaginary holiday. Early in the process, students used the Weblog to post ideas about possible stories by writing about the potential characters, the theme of the play, the plot of the story, and how the plot will resolve. Other students then examine all of the brainstorming ideas, offer comments and suggestions, and then as they move into groups, they are brimming with possibilities. The Weblog becomes a tool for collaboration.

It was from this very positive experience with my own classroom that I decided that the Weblog, with its built-in communication templates, could do even more, if given the right set of circumstances (such as funding, teacher interest, access to computers, etc.) and when the National Writing Project announced it would be funding technology initiative grants, I wrote a proposal and secured $15,000 a year for two years to establish a collaborative writing space for students in two relatively impoverished communities in Western Massachusetts.

Last summer (after being appointed the new technology liaison for the Western Massachusetts Writing Project), I led a week-long professional development workshop for 12 teachers that centered on how to use a Weblog as a tool for education and collaboration. Our philosophical goal of the Making Connections Project was to sow some seeds of understanding between students in two very different communities. As a group, we developed curriculum for a free summer technology writing camp and for a longer program that began in November and extended through the end of January.

Students wrote about themselves, about their communities, and about their views of the world. They interacted with one another through postings on the Weblog. They read short stories together (one of the rural genre and one of the urban genre) and then posted reflections. They used technology as a tool for understanding. The walls between living in an isolated rural community and living in a crowded urban center were breached, and while they could recognize their differences, they could also understand their similarities.

We had four middle schools, nine classrooms and more than 100 students involved in the project, and the interest level of students was very high, and the teachers rightly viewed themselves on the cutting edge of technology and education.

I have also begun recreating the Weblog that the Western Massachusetts Writing Project has traditionally used as a newsletter. My goal is to have the Weblog become a publishing source for our network of teachers as well as a source of information, and we have begun posting stories and writings from our teachers in the network. We have also begun using Wiki technology for collaborative writing. The Wiki, which is like a cousin to the Weblog, allows for instant posting and editing. I have also begun using a Wiki in my sixth grade classroom and it is amazing to see how quickly students pick up on a new technological idea.

As a teacher and as a technology leader, I am constantly amazed at both the emergence of new technology (such as podcasting for audio files and digital storytelling capabilities) and at how excited and interested and involved students can get in their learning through the hook of these new ideas. At its best, these tools of technology can break down geographic, social and economic barriers.

I still think about that moment in the classroom when Mr. Morrison, from so very far away, connected with that little girl. The tools have become better, and will certainly continue to do so, but it was the personal connection over a global distance through technology that remains with me today, as an educator. As long as we focus on how technology is a tool at our disposal, and use our own imagination for using these tools, the world will become both a smaller place through the connections we make with others and a larger place as we comprehend the vastness of individual experiences.

Project: Pen Pal Exchange
Dates: Spring 2004/2005
Students: 45 sixth and fifth graders at two different schools
Technology used: Audacity recording software, Weblog

Technology has allowed me to build upon the idea of collaboration that can benefit the educational experiences of my sixth grade students.

For example, in the past three years, I have fostered a pen pal project that links my suburban classroom with a very urban classroom in a nearby city. We use the novels Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown and Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman as a way to help students to become creative. They make flat representatives of themselves, and then keep and exchange journals about their lives as a flat replica of the student. They write short stories based on their own neighborhoods. The culmination of the project is a visit between the classes, and they work with their partners to create poems together, which we then publish on my classroom Weblog, along with photos of the two classes together.

You can view some of the poems and see the Weblog site with excerpts of short stories and a photo of both classes together. We also created what we called an audio postcard, in which my students recorded an audio greeting on the computer with Audacity software. The greeting was directed at their pen pal, and then we burned the files on CD, sent it along to the other classroom and made a link on the Weblog to the audio file. The link to that audio postcard is here. The Weblog site provided a virtual connection between two very different classrooms.

Project: Cyberpals
Dates: Winter-Spring 2006
Students: 40 sixth, seventh and eighth graders at two different schools
Technology used: Weblog
Website: http://blogs.writingproject.org/blogwrite333/

            This project was born out of the success of my collaboration with a teacher in my region and the desire to use the power of the Weblog to connect my students with others outside of our geographic area.

            A logical choice was to join forces with a teacher I have met at National Writing Project meetings and whose work in the field of technology I greatly admire – Maria Lourdes Angala, who teaches at the Jefferson Junior High School in Washington, DC. Maria and I had discussed a pen pal project last year but it never panned out, and after meeting in Pittsburg in November 2005, we set a plan in motion.

            I solicited and received a Weblog from the National Writing Project and set it up as a site for interaction between my suburban students and her urban students. We agreed to establish cyberteams – small groups of students who would interact in their own sector of the Weblog while still being part of the larger community.

            Students are introducing themselves, posing questions and responding, and developing ways to community across both geographic distance and socio-economic divides.

            The project is really just underway, but the entire foundation of what we are doing stems from the much larger project I have overseen this past year called Making Connections, which has involved many students at various schools creating a shared virtual writing space through Weblog technology. (That project is described in greater detail down below)

Project: Digital Storytelling
Dates: Spring 2005 and anticipated Spring 2006
Students: 40 sixth and second graders
Technology used: Microsoft MovieMaker, digital cameras
Website: http://www.umass.edu/wmwp/DigitalStorytelling/Digital%20Storytelling%20Main%20Page.htm

Collaboration also takes place inside our school with technology.

Last year, I began a new initiative with a second grade teacher in my school around the idea of digital storytelling. Together, we wrote a curriculum that uses the concept of claymation animation with computers for collaborative storytelling. Groups of sixth and second graders developed a story with plot and characters, molded their characters out of clay, used digital cameras to record still images, and then produced a small claymation film using Microsoft MovieMaker software. The 10 short films were then put into a larger movie that focused on the theme of collaboration, with students explaining what collaboration means to them and how they collaborated for the movie project.

The digital movie was then shown through the entire school for every classroom via the closed network system, and families were invited into the school one day for a premiere showing of the film. All students then received a DVD copy of the movie. In the final reflections, my sixth graders expressed a high interest in this sort of project, focusing as much on the technology as the partnerships with the younger students in the building.

As an extension of the project, I created a website resource for other teachers in our region and in the Western Massachusetts Writing Project for using digital storytelling in the classroom. I also presented workshops about the collaborative claymation project at the New England Association of Teachers of English Annual Meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, in the fall of 2005 and at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, in fall of 2005.

One of the amazing things to watch unfold during this project was how quickly and how effectively a group of sixth and second graders could work together and find common ground on such tricky topics as plot development, character development and story writing. Although the sixth graders took on a leadership role, the second graders certainly asserted themselves with creative ideas and story direction.

The use of MovieMaker technology brought the collaboration to another level altogether because it was a new tool for them to learn and manipulate, and they could transform the paper storyboard they were required to create into a short movie. When we added the element of “audience,” since the movies would be shown to the entire school community and to family, the young writers really began to focus. They wanted to create a digital movie that would impress their friends and family.

Project: The Electronic Pencil Weblog
Dates: 2003-2006
Students: 80 sixth graders (each year)
Technology used: Weblog, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Paint, Audacity, etc.
Website: http://blogs.writingproject.org/oh/

Three years ago, I began incorporating a Weblog into my sixth grade writing classroom. I had seen the possibilities for writing during a summer program with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, and I wanted to integrate it into my classroom as much as possible.

The first year, I used the Weblog mostly as a publishing site for some student work, such as PowerPoint storyboards for literature study, and as a way to get information home to parents.

Last year, I took things a step further by encouraging students to post their own stories and projects directly to the site, and although we did not have a computer lab, I showed them how to comment and discuss each other’s writing. As I have mentioned, access to computers was an issue, so using the Weblog was a voluntary activity. However, more than two-thirds of my 80 students posted something on the site from home during the course of the school year and I received many positive comments from parents about how their children were excited about writing via the site.

This year, our school has a cart with 30 new laptop computers, and so I have been able to do even more with our Weblog. Already, students in four different writing classes that I teach have posted short stories, projects designed in Microsoft Publisher, PowerPoint storyboards, MP3 radio plays, digital photos and many other projects with a basis in technology. Students have interacted with others in different classes via the site.

To date, my Weblog – which the students named The Electronic Pencil – has been home to more than 1,800 posted pieces of writing by my students. They have been learning about how technology fosters communication across distances, about writing etiquette in this world of instant messaging, about the power of hyperlinking texts and visual images, and about many different software programs on the laptops.

I teach four sixth grade writing classes, and what became clear early on with using the Weblog was that it would break down the walls and help foster a real sense of a cohesive writing community. One student last year who was rather prolific with using the Weblog mentioned another writer in another class, which I wrote down at the time to use in a paper I was writing for a graduate class because it seemed to capture the power of this technology.

Some students had decided to use the Weblog to create their own short story contests, and I had allowed them this freedom out of curiosity. Here is a transcript of our exchange:

“M. posted a story,” T. told me one morning, in a rush of words. “For my contest.”

            “I know,” I responded. “That was nice of her.”

            “M. and I used to hate each other,” T. said suddenly, looking a bit distant in his thought.

            “Oh? Why is that?” I asked, wondering how these two charming students – both academically talented and both good-natured people – would ever be at odds with each other. It didn’t make sense.

            “It was in fourth grade. I got mad at her and she got mad at me, and all of last year in the hallways, we just glared at each other,” T. said. He smiled. “Now she’s posted a story for my contest. A good story.”

            I nodded.

            “I guess she doesn’t hate me anymore,” he added.

            “Do you hate her?”

            “I guess not,” he said excitedly, and then danced off to join some other friends across the room.

            The next step for my sixth graders? I am coordinating a Weblog-based pen pal project with a colleague who teaches special education in Washington D.C. We have met at National Writing Project meetings and we are working on a plan to connect her student writers with my student writers via the Internet.

Project: Making Connections – Technology, Writing and Community
Dates: Summer 2005-Winter 2006
Students: 100-plus middle school students from four different middle schools

• Athol-Royalston Middle School, Athol, Massachusetts
• E.N. White Middle School, Holyoke, Massachusetts
• John Lynch Middle School, Holyoke, Massachusetts
• Peck Middle School, Holyoke, Massachusetts

Technology used: Weblog
Websites: (teacher resource site) http://blogs.writingproject.org/blogWrite256/ and (student site) http://blogs.writingproject.org/blogWrite255/

The use of a Weblog in my own classroom led me to the idea that the Weblog could be more than just a simple writing space. With its ability to cut across geographic lines (all you need is an Internet connection), the Weblog might offer the opportunity for young writers to create a space of understanding themselves and others who live in different types of communities.

This idea spurred me on to write and receive a grant from the National Writing Project for the Making Connections Project, which has used Weblogs as a place for middle school students in a rural town in Western Massachusetts (Athol) to interact with middle school student in an urban city (Holyoke) via the Internet.

The project had four main elements:

• Provide professional development and support for middle school teachers who were involved in the program;
• Develop a summer technology writing camp;
• Develop a curriculum for the school year that used Weblogs as a virtual community writing space;
• Disseminate information about the success and shortcomings of the program to a local, regional and national audience through journal writing, workshops and other sources.

A middle school girl -- I will call her Angela -- sat huddled around a computer last summer in a school not far from the roar of I-91 and wrote about the dichotomy of living in an urban center of Western Massachusetts on the Weblog.

“What I like about my city, Holyoke, is the Connecticut River,” she wrote. “It’s so beautiful. It’s so peaceful. What I would change about Holyoke is the crime and violence. We don’t need any more violence!”

Many miles away, in the rural town of Athol, not far from the scenic Quabbin Reservoir, another middle school girl -- let’s call her Valerie -- wrote this on her computer: “If I could fix one problem in the world it would be poverty. I would end poverty because so many people die of poverty every day. Did you know that every 3 seconds a child dies from AIDS, HIV, poverty, of hunger? I would end poverty to help make the world a better place (no matter how corny that sounds.)”

By the end of December 2005, there had been more than 2,000 pieces of writing published in this electronic writing space and that writing was being read by the more than 100 students involved in the project. The user-friendly format of the Weblog has allowed student to post comments and discussion points, with immediate feedback. Where Weblogs are now being touted as the new age of journalism, the benefits of such on-line publishing is still relatively unknown for the classroom.

But these tools of emerging technology can be utilized to bridge some of the socio-economic divides that exist between students such as these young writers who live fairly isolated lives but who are becoming more and more proficient in tapping into the resources of their computer and the Internet.

They have been learning about their peers, and they have been learning about themselves.

In their writing and comments, students involved in the project have discussed music, and politics, and the troubles that they see in their own communities. They have read short stories together and used the Weblog as source for reading responses. They have written about their neighborhoods, about the places they know best. They have turned the mirror on themselves. They have created web pages about their interests and then connected their own pages to others in this virtual network. And yes, they have socialized with words.

The power of language is still intact, even in this electronic form. Just ask any teenager what IM means, and you’ll quickly realize that you are venturing into another world of communication.

We often hear the mantra in education that we must prepare our students for the future. But it is obvious from the quickening pace of technology that we have no idea what the future holds. We would be fools even to speculate.

Instead, we need to fall back to one of the core missions of education: teaching our students about the value of life and differences between people, and about finding ways to connect with others in the world in a positive way.

The value is not in the technology, but in the understanding and connections the students are making while using those tools.

There have been any number of surprises in this project, including how quickly students have taken to using this technology to communicate and collaborate across geographic distance. I wanted to share a few quotes from students and teachers as they reflected on the use of technology, the use of weblogs and their own experiences. These are taken directly from our Weblogs.

         A web log is a log in which you talk to other people on the web (internet).The web log allows you to talk to different people all over the world. You get to describe yourself and what you are like. You give people the chance to get to know you. That is what I think a web log is. -- Taniesha

         Well I personally think that technology can do just about anything. It can show others how others live and what types of things they do for fun. For example someone in Athol can do different things for hobbies than people in Holyoke. Or people in Athol can do more or less things there than people in Holyoke. Also I think that technology helps me personally meet new people in a special way. It helps me learn about different people through the internet. Also technology keeps communicated or in touch with others such as like the people in Athol or in Peck middle school. Well that is how I think technology is used. – Amerilees

            One thing I learned at this program is that there are other ways to talk to people instead of the chat. Another thing I enjoyed about this camp is that I got to meet a lot of people from different places. I also enjoyed that there are many people out there that are just like me in so many ways. One thing I would change about this camp to make it better is to make this last through the whole year. I would like to work on this blog stuff all year long. – Kayleene

“Growing up in Athol, I understand how living in a small community can become isolating for young people … Sharing their writing with peers in other communities is an invaluable tool that many young people do not get to experience … I believe we can share those (life-long learning) experiences and show the community that we can continue to build positive learning environments in our small town … I have a strong commitment to the young people in Athol and I know that this program will give students a positive image of themselves as competitive learners and be able to share their knowledge and experiences with others.” - Deborah Piragas, language arts teacher, Athol-Royalston Middle School.

“This project seems to be a great opportunity for all of us - teachers, students, communities, etc. There is a great potential for using these blogs to help different communities communicate in a personal and meaningful way, and hopefully that personal growth for all of us can be a foundation for the academic work. It is something new for me and I am hoping that this will be the beginning of new ideas, opportunities, and experiences for building community in and around our schools.” - Andrew Habana Hafner, social studies/language arts teacher, Peck Middle School

“I'm just amazed at the work the kids have done. I love how they've communicated and found common ground while celebrating their individuality. They've increased their abilities with technology while exploring themselves and others in this casual, relaxed atmosphere.” –Mary Donah, language arts teacher, Peck Middle School.

View some of the writing and curriculum:

• This is a sample of the curriculum developed by teachers as a collaborative professional development seminar
• Student All About Me pages: Sample 1 and Sample 2
• These are some student introductions of themselves
• Student reflections on using technology in the classroom for communication with others
• Students using the Weblog for shared reading responses

  The art of teaching is often the act of isolation.

I remember this realization dawning on me during my first year of teaching and it still remains with me to this day. We are often the only adults alone in the classroom with 20 or more students, and everything we do – from the tone of our voice to the choice of our words to the design of projects – determines so much in the lives of our students.

And we do it alone, for the most part.

After my first year of teaching, I joined a network of classroom teachers and writers called the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, which is part of the National Writing Project, and one facet of this organization that I love is that it is made up and run by classroom teachers who collaborate and support each other in classroom practice and personal writing. This model has since filtered into my own teaching practices and I have actively reached out to other teachers for projects that not only connect my students with others, but also connects me, as a professional, with other teachers.

Since that time, I have worked hard to develop collaborative relationships with teachers not only in my school, but also across our region. These ventures have included:

• A pen pal project that uses the novels Flat Stanley and Seedfolks as a centerpiece for my suburban students to connect with students in a nearby city. The project involves journal writing, reflection, shared readings, and collaborative poetry. My teacher-partner at the other school and I have since developed a 90-minute workshop to share our ideas. We presented our workshop to teachers in the fall of 2005 through the Pioneer Valley Reading Association. Each year, my partner and I spend time discussing ways to improve the program, adding new elements. This coming year, for example, we intend to have each class create a mural that has images and words that represent each community and present the murals as a gift during the visit.
   
• Here is a sample of a collaborative student poem that was written on the day the pen pals actually met each other. (The poems and photos from the visit were later put on our Weblog for both classes to view and reflect upon):
  

  I live in Southampton
  I live in Springfield
  I like squirrels
  I like dogs
  We both like basketball
  We both hate cats
  We both are about the same

  -- Lucas and Derek

• A Cyberpal Project with a fellow National Writing Project teacher in Washington DC, in which we use a Weblog to connect our middle school students together. Our hope is to pilot this idea and share the results with the rest of the National Writing Project network of technology leaders in the next year.
   
• A digital storytelling project in which my sixth grade students teamed up with a class of second grade students to design a claymation movie, using storyboards, modeling clay, digital cameras and Microsoft MovieMaker software. The students work in small groups on all aspects of the project, from the initial planning sessions to the production and editing of the movies on the computer. The second grade teacher and I developed the partnership of students together, working on materials and instruction as a team. We have since developed a workshop on digital storytelling, and I have presented this workshop at both the New England Association of Teachers of English Annual Meeting in fall of 2005 in Nashua, New Hampshire, and at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting in the fall of 2005 in Pittsburgh, PA.
   
• The Making Connections Weblog Project is based almost entirely on collaboration and technology. A team of teachers from four different middle schools in two very different communities came together last summer to learn about how to integrate technology into the classroom and to develop a curriculum for using Weblogs to create a virtual writing space for students separated by geographic distances. As the leader, my job was to foster communication among these veteran teachers, keep them focused on our tasks and then oversee the implementation of the curriculum in the various classrooms. One teacher noted, at the end of the summer, that not only did they create a sense of community for students (who took part in a free one-week technology writing camp), but that the teachers themselves now saw themselves as members of a community of professionals. It didn’t matter any longer which school they were from, or whether they were teaching in a rural or urban environment. Together, they had created an innovative program and through their own writing, and reflections and comments via the Weblog, they had come to see themselves as a united group of dedicated educators. These connections were symbolized by a Virtual Community Garden we constructed that linked all of the teacher-created web pages via a dedicated Weblog, and through the use of the Weblog as a tool for reflection throughout the endeavor.
   
• As the technology liaison for the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, I have attempted to use technology to draw teachers together. One such endeavor was a collaborative writing story that used the power of web-based Wiki. Teachers could add to a story that I started and, in doing so, begin to see the power of this tool. By using different colors, the reader can visually see the various additions to the story. You can find the story here.  I also experimented with the collaborative writing idea with my sixth graders, using the Wiki and colored fonts. You can view that story here.
   

As I think back on these projects, I realize that there are many strands of collaboration that make a project successful.

First, you need to be fully engaged as a teacher in the learning objectives of your students. Every project is designed with the outcomes evident, whether it is producing a certain type of writing or creating an original claymation movie.

Second, you have to design projects that are fun and engaging for both the teachers and the students. If teachers on a collaborative project are bored with the material, then their students most certainly will be bored, too. If we, as teachers, can generate excitement and interest, students feed off of that.

Third, collaboration requires a lot of give and take. I have always entered collaboration brimming with ideas but then have had to remind myself that a member of a team must be willing to adapt. Sometimes, this has meant shelving an idea for the future.

Finally, a good collaborative model needs constant nourishment and support, and as the leader of the Making Connections project, I have often acted as a distant cheerleader for the other teachers, offering encouragement, suggestions and fixes to technological glitches. For teachers new to technology, in particular, it seems to be quite necessary for there to be a presence of an experienced hand (or at least, the appearance of an experienced hand) that they can fall back to during difficult moments or times of trouble.

One example of this effort in the Making Connections Project was when some students at the one of the schools begin posting some inappropriate language on the Weblog, which caused a ripple of trouble throughout the community of young writers. The student had resorted to some “street talk” that was no appropriate. One teacher at another school complained to me about the informal language being used, and I had to remind all teachers that the nature of this project was educational and that classroom and school rules and policies still existed. I also removed the postings, and the air was cleared. It is clear that a collaborative model still needs a leader to direct the efforts of the group.

  It’s all too easy to discover some new tool of technology and become so enamored of its possibilities that you begin to use it in the classroom before you have even thought about the learning objectives supporting the tool. I have tried to avoid that with the technology projects that I have been part of, and have always kept in the back of my mind the idea that technology is a tool that can be used to enhance the things I can already do without technology.
            Therefore, when designing collaborative programs, such as using a Weblog for writing, I have worked hard to connect the lessons and the projects with the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks, which guide us as teachers in our state. But I also have kept an eye on national standards, too.

            For example, when conducting the Making Connections Weblog Project, in which middle schools collaborate and communicate in a virtual writing community, there were many strands to connect to various curriculum standards.

            First, the Massachusetts Educational Technology Standards (http://www.doe.mass.edu/edtech/standards/itstand.pdf) provides a variety of skills that middle schools (through grade eight) should be able to accomplish and the Making Connections Project accomplishes many of these, such as:

• Identify basic elements of a web site (Students in Making Connections design web pages about themselves and create their own hyperlinked pages)
• Identify and use basic drawing and painting programs (Students in Making Connections create self-portraits of themselves in Microsoft Paint and then post it to the Weblog)
• Effectively use search engines to find information.
• and others, such as basic keyboarding skills.

Second, with regard to subject area curriculum in Massachusetts, the Making Connections program touches on many areas of the state’s Curriculum Frameworks. The group of teachers involved documented the alignment to the state curriculum in the areas of English Language Arts, History and Social Studies and Art, and that curriculum alignment document can be found online at the Teachers’ Resource Weblog site.

            In consideration of the National Educational Standards for Students, the program also falls within that realm of expectations. For example, the program is aligned with these national standards for students before Grade 8 (http://cnets.iste.org/students/s_profile-68.html ):

• Use content-specific tools, software, and simulations (e.g., environmental probes, graphing calculators, exploratory environments, Web tools) to support learning and research.
• Apply productivity/multimedia tools and peripherals to support personal productivity, group collaboration, and learning throughout the curriculum.
• Design, develop, publish, and present products (e.g., Web pages, videotapes) using technology resources that demonstrate and communicate curriculum concepts to audiences inside and outside the classroom.
• Collaborate with peers, experts, and others using telecommunications and collaborative tools to investigate curriculum-related problems, issues, and information, and to develop solutions or products for audiences inside and outside the classroom.

  What students learn and how to assess their learning is always a difficulty with project-based education. There are rarely any right and wrong answers. I have come to believe that the use of scoring rubrics for collaborative projects is one way to assess academic achievement by students. In every case, I share the scoring rubric with students beforehand so that the expectations are completely clear before beginning a new project. In some cases in my writing class, the students will help develop the categories and scoring range of a rubric for a particular project.

            In the case of the Digital Claymation Storytelling Project, in which my sixth grade students collaborated with second grade students, the rubric I developed and utilized was created at the RubriStar website and the rubric is part of my Digital Storytelling Website that I created for the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.

            The rubric focuses on the development of the creation of a story as a digital project. The scoring guide can be found at the WMWP website: http://www.umass.edu/wmwp/DigitalStorytelling/Rubric%20Assessment.htm.

            For the Making Connections Project, the rubric focused as much as using the Weblog as a communication device as it did for the aspects of writing. That rubric, also created at RubriStar, can be found at the Making Connections Teacher Resource site: http://sblogs.writingproject.org/gems/blogWrite256/rubric.php.

  Students of the current generation view computers as a household object, one that is natural for them to turn to for research, games and communication. Many educators, however, view the computer as a complicated device with very little use in the classroom other than word processing and something to occupy students during empty minutes.

            In designing projects that tap into the communicative power of technology, I am hoping to show students, parents and other educators that there are tremendous opportunities out there and that more are on the horizon.

            Here are some sample reflections from students who have used technology in the programs I have designed:

“Technology has definitely brought people together in many ways. Such as this blog write we are using today. I would have never known or met any one in Athol if it wasn't for computers. I got to know and learn and share interests with people from other schools and towns.” – Katie

“A blog is a web log. A web log is a log on the Internet. You can use blogs for personal writing or anything else that you would like to .I enjoy logs because you can express your self and feelings to other people and you know if they want to talk about it also. I think that having the schools do this is a great idea. It gives us a chance to communicate with other kids from across the district. And talk to each other about things that spark our interest.” – Nicole

Students involved in the Making Connections Project seemed to become energized by the responses posted to their writing, and there was a palpable disappointment when that didn’t happen. The social energy that most middle school students have to gather as a group, to talk and to interact is what drives a Weblog project such as Making Connections. Instead of eliminating the socialization, the Weblog project seeks to channel that energy and helps students make new connections with students from different socio-economic backgrounds.

Our curriculum was developed with this understanding in mind, and the weaving of tasks using technology (such as learning about the power of hyperlinks), shared reading and response (they all read the same short stories), and the creation of webpages about themselves that were all connected in a virtual garden area were established with the philosophy of growth of students as writers but also as members of society. Technology was being used to bridge that possible gap in understanding how people are different and how people are the same, and where do preconceptions work their way into our observations.

Students found similarities along some common lines, such as sports and music, but they also understood that growing up in an urban center was vastly different from growing up in a rural town.

Here is what Bridget wrote about her urban community: “My community is Holyoke. There are a lot of good things and bad things about Holyoke. To start off with one good thing is that we have enough schools and jobs for our community’s people. Also we have a lot of entertainment for all of the kids and teenagers in Holyoke. On the other side there are many bad things about Holyoke. Such as crime and violence. Violence I think is the down fall of Holyoke. I also think that our community would be so much better with out these things. This issue plays a big role in many teenagers life. N o one wants to grow up to violence but unfortunately we have to . In conclusion that is my community of Holyoke.”

Here is what Vanessa wrote about her rural community: “One thing that I like about Athol is the fact that you can walk almost anywhere that you need to go. In Athol you know almost everyone, and where things are. The thing that I don't like about Athol is the fact that it is so small.”

In my own writing classroom, the use of the Weblog has also created a sense of community among the 80 sixth graders I teach in four different sessions. They regularly read work of friends and others from different classes and we talk in the classroom about the quality of the work and the creativity that is being expressed through the Weblog itself. Meanwhile, parents and family members are regular visitors to the site, providing them with a glance into the writing class curriculum and samples of student work from any location.

  The single most important decision that I reached as a first year teacher was to join the National Writing Project network. I believe this because the writing project is an organization built from the bottom-up, with teachers as leaders, that utilizes collaboration and sharing of ideas as the main engine for professional growth. Whether it is the use of reading response groups, or conducting/participating in workshops or just networking about the state of teaching, members of the writing project are connected in a way that is much deeper than anything else that I have been part of.

            This sense of being connected through our students and our work in the classroom has so positively impacted me as an educator that I have become a technology leader in the Western Massachusetts Writing Project but I have also sought out more and more ways that I can work with other teachers, and then, by extension, have my students work with other students.

            I am constantly learning from others and I am always seeking out ideas and projects that have had success elsewhere, and then I wonder how I can adapt it for my classrooms, and then share it with those in our writing project network of teachers. I am a member of a handful of professional Weblogs established by the National Writing Project for sharing of ideas centered on the use of technology. I have taken part in something known as the e-Anthology, which is run every summer by the National Writing Project to connect hundreds of teachers through a shared writing and response space via the Internet. The success of each of these collaborative projects has inspired me as a teacher to engage my students in their work.

The digital storytelling project is a good example. I had read some articles about the use of technology to tell stories and then, as part of a graduate class, I saw some projects that college students had done using computers to share personal narratives. I realized that I could tap into this genre with my own sixth grade students. Meanwhile, a colleague of mine at my school was working on short movies with his second graders that were shown to the entire school.

It dawned on me that collaboration between myself and my colleague, and our group of collective students, might be a logical next step for both us, and he readily agreed. Our planning yielded a six-week curriculum based on using clay (in conjunction with a third teacher, the art instructor) and digital cameras and digital movies.

The impetus for the Making Connections Weblog Project was also based on personal experience (using a Weblog first with the writing project and then in my classroom) and the desire to share my experiences as a teacher with others. The collaboration grew out the vision that technology could be used as a writing and community-building tool for students in areas that might be affected by isolation, poverty and economic difficulties.

The system we created also allowed teachers to have their own resource and reflection Weblog even as their students were creating a writing community on other Weblogs. Therefore, the project had parallel tracks – the students were hard at work on one end of the spectrum and the teachers, working in separate buildings and separate towns, were hard at work on the other.

It is a highlight of my short tenure so far as a teacher that the program achieved success. By pulling together a group of 12 teachers, and providing leadership, I can truly say that technology, although still emerging, has its place in the classroom as a collaborative and educational device that moves the computer far beyond its place as a source for games and Internet research. The next generation of the Internet will be more and more interactivity and participation by the users, and I am excited about the possibilities for the classroom.

And as I move towards my own cyberpal project with a National Writing Project colleague in Washington, DC, I am further excited about the possibilities of flattening the world for our students.

As part of the National Writing Project network, I have also developed a series of workshops around the use of Weblog for building a writing community and integration of technology, including the formation of a Virtual Weblog Workshop for teachers to experiment with Weblogs. That Virtual Workshop site can be found at here.

  I am a writer.

I spent ten years as a newspaper journalist, writing every single day, and since I became a teacher, I have continued my pursuit of words and stories. I have published articles about teaching and my family in local newspapers and in regional newspapers such as The Boston Globe. I have published articles and short stories in The Leaflet, which is the professional journal of the New England Association of Teachers of English. I was a finalist for NEATE Poet of the Year in 2004 and I am a songwriter, poet and playwright.

I recognize that writers are often alone with their thoughts and therefore, I have always found resources that offer support and collaboration from others to be an important element of who I am as a writer. Technology continues to open up new avenues for extended support networks.

The National Writing Project, for example, has a summer-long e-Anthology that allows members to post short stories, professional articles, personal narratives, poems and other styles of writing for an audience of hundreds of fellow teacher-writers, whom use their computers to read and respond and offer advice and criticism. Locally, at the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, we have a newsletter Weblog that I helped re-launch and which is dedicated to publishing the writing of our teachers, and I have utilized that approach myself as a writer. (The WMWP Newsletter can be found here).

Just like for students, technology opens doors that may not have even existed ten years ago, and I am forever on the look-out for what is next. I have begun experimenting with Wiki technology, which really offers the possibility of collaboration among writers. I created a story for my sixth grade students (you can view the student collaborative story called Mr. Mole in the Hole here) and for the teachers in the Western Massachusetts Writing Project network (you can view the collaborative Wiki story called A UMass Mystery here). The Wiki and Weblog possibilities extend beyond “flat” publishing, too, in that hyperlinks and photos and multi-media elements can all become part of how we view ourselves as writers.

The future for writers with an open mind is exciting, I believe, and I am ready to experiment with whatever comes my way. In doing so, however, I also am viewing these new innovations through the lens of an educator, wondering how these new tools might help my student writers, too.

  I believe in the model of teachers sharing their best practices with other teachers, and therefore, for the three collaborative projects I have undertaken here, I have also designed and presented workshops for other teachers, often collaborating with other teachers who have been involved in the project.

            A workshop called It’s a Flat, Flat World, presented to the Pioneer Valley Reading Association in Fall 2005, was given to an audience of more than 100 teachers in Western Massachusetts. The workshop was developed and presented by myself and the other teacher involved with the pen pal exchange, and we integrated technology both into the presentation and in the resources for others to use.

            I also presented a workshop called A Collaborative Claymation Adventure: Digital Storytelling at the annual meetings of both the New England Association of Teachers of English in Nashua, New Hampshire, and the National Writing Project in Pittsburg, PA, in the Fall of 2005. I also created a website resource for other teachers who were interested in digital storytelling and that site is part of the main website of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.

            Finally, with three other members of the Making Connections program, we developed and presented a workshop called Making Connections: Creating a Virtual Writing Community at the NEATE Annual Meeting in New Hampshire in the Fall 2005. We have also been sharing our project, including successes and frustrations, with a national audience through two Weblogs of the National Writing Project. One is a Weblog for all technology liaisons for the NWP and the other Weblog is for all of the sites that received the Technology Initiative grant money.

            In addition, the Making Connections Project has helped spur planning for a large Conference on Writing, Teaching and Technology to be held at University of Massachusetts Amherst this coming spring. The Western Massachusetts Writing Project is a partner in the planning and hosting of the conference that seeks to highlight the ways in which technology and writing are coming together. The Making Connections Project will be featured as one of the workshops to be presented to educators from across the New England region.

            At the inception of the project, one of the participants suggested integrating a video documentation feature into the program as part of his doctoral studies at the University of Massachusetts. After gaining proper permissions, this teacher began setting up his video camera during the professional development sessions and during the summer camp when students were working. Due to unforeseen circumstances, this teacher has since left his job in the Holyoke school system but he has remained part of Making Connections as our documentarian and he is developing a short video about how teachers in Athol and Holyoke began using Weblogs for their middle school students. Our hope is to air it both on the local cable access channels and for the Western Massachusetts Writing Project to use it as a promotional tool for the work being done in the network.

            Finally, the local affiliate of National Public Radio decided to do a radio news story on our project after I submitted a proposed commentary to the station. The reporter interviewed teachers and students and broadcast the story in late January 2006.

  In my opinion, the best way to achieve success in collaborative projects is to have a vision of where you hope things might end up (through creativity and an eye on learning objectives), set things into motion and then be flexible when difficulties arise. This bottom-up approach has served me well in the endeavors that I have been part of as a teacher.

            I have found, as a teacher, that once a project is underway where students are working together towards a goal (such as creating a digital story), my role is more like a coach and guide, navigating them through tricky situations, such as personality conflicts and the art of compromise. It helps that the teacher is often viewed as the authority figure in the classroom and therefore, my voice carries weight. But the teacher must balance words of advice with independence of students if the products are to be authentic work and accomplishments.

            As a teacher involved in collaborative professional development, it is imperative that you establish a level playing ground with your colleagues and that you invite their expertise into the mix right from the start. If you begin with the assumption that you, as the leader, know everything, the venture is surely doomed to failure.

            This bottom-up approach is at the heart of the National Writing Project, and the Making Connections Project is a good example. I came up with the idea of using Weblogs to connect middle school students, received the grant and then recruited the teachers. During the professional development seminars, however, I made sure everyone understood that the curriculum and design of the project was in all of our hands and I truly did not have any preconceived notions of what the actual project would look like, although I had some suggestions for direction of study.

            One way we did this was by dedicated one entire Weblog to us as educators, and using that as a resource for learning about technology, about collaboration and for experimentation. For example, after all teachers built web pages about themselves (as models for what we would have students create), we decided as a group to construct a “virtual garden” that would link all of our pages together. Here is that Virtual Community Garden.

            The result of this work was that we built a community of educators first, and then worked on a plan for building a community of young writers. By ceding my authority, and offering suggestions and positive feedback, I was able to help these veteran teachers see the potential for integrating technology into their classrooms.

            I was as much a collaborator and participants as I was a leader.

            When the project was launched, I was connected to them only through the Weblog sites and email. When trouble arose, I would respond quickly with advice or a quick technological fix, and these actions demonstrated to the team of teachers that my presence was still there, even if I was not in physical contact with them. What this did was place much of the burden for success on their shoulders, and they came through with shining colors, I believe. My success as the leader of this project was in their hands, and I was completely comfortable in that fact.

            Here is what one teacher wrote in a reflection on the Teacher Resource Weblog: “Before entering the program I had little knowledge of blogs, how they worked, and how
effective they could be for educational purposes.  The ability to move around the blog, post, discuss, and view others responses are technical skills I am far more comfortable with now.  Because many of the skills were new to me during the summer, and our training was more intense and concentrated, I found a level of competency that I might not otherwise have acquired.” -- Eva

            In our first meeting of teachers involved in the Making Connections program, I asked the group of educators to raise their hands if they had ever heard of the term ‘Weblogs’ before being recruited for our project. Of the 12 teachers in the room, only two raised their hands. This was clearly a group of veteran educators, with many more years of experience in the classroom than I had, but they were game to try something new and innovative. That was why they were there. My job, therefore, was not only to teach them the tools of technological collaboration, but also to assure them that they were pioneers in this field and that others would be watching and modeling their own projects on the design of our success. The incentive of being leaders, as articulated right from the start, helped them to keep focus on the learning objectives for students and implementation of technology for other educators.

            Much of the planning and development of the program for students was done by this dedicated group of teachers, not by me, and this empowered them to take control of what the project would look like. All too often, professional development in our school is a model of an expert telling the teachers what the next best thing is going to be and how it will be implemented, and I have never enjoyed that model.

            By passing the authority to the teachers in the group, and by allowing teachers to have time to experiment with the technology to see what might work and what might be difficult to use in the classroom, these educators came up with a wonderful collaborative curriculum that uses Weblogs for creation of a virtual writing space for their middle school students.

            I think we have to find ways to give veteran teachers more of this power, and if we expect quality work from them and provide the support they need to succeed, we can change the way education is delivered in this country.

            Already, one of the teachers in our project is seeking other ways to get her science students to use the power of the Internet to study and publish their own scientific studies and hopefully, conduct shared experiments with students from distant places. She saw the power of the Internet and the publishing possibilities for writing, and now she wants to take it to the next step. In my opinion, that represents true success of the entire program from a professional perspective.

            Finally, one of the goals of the Making Connections initiative is to share this information with others, and I decided that a collaborative writing model for a journal article would be the way to go. Therefore, I put together a rough draft of a proposal article, and posted it at our Teacher Resource Weblog, and other teachers in the program went in and made editing changes and added information to the article before I submitted it for publication to two different sources: The Voice, a publication of the National Writing Project, and The Leaflet, a publication of the New England Association of Teachers of English. You can find the online version of the article here.

   One thing that attracts me to an organization like The Global SchoolNet Foundation is that it establishes a network of teachers who are willing to share their ideas and support initiatives. I am honored to have been nominated for this award, and I am just as excited to have found out more about Global SchoolNet as a result of this nomination process. Already, after looking through some of the past winners, I have begun to formulate some ideas for the future and I even signed up for the electronic newsletter created and distributed by another one of the nominees, Jennifer Wagner, and it seems as if she is brimming with great ideas. I look forward to receiving that newsletter. I am very interested in the CyberFair project and the Friendship through Education initiative, and I will be pursuing those possibilities for my classroom. I was also pleased to see that Microsoft has award the organization a sizeable grant to help with collaborative Internet-based projects. I hope that the programs piloted in San Diego will get filtered out to school districts elsewhere in the country. And finally, after signing up for the Global SchoolNet newsletter, I realize the wealth of resources that are available to me as an educator as part of the Global SchoolNet network.

            I think one of the main challenges of any collaborative project that centers on technology is the lack of professional development and support for classroom teachers. As educators, we need time to experiment and see what works. We need to try out things for ourselves and work the kinks out that way. Technology coordinators need to slow down when working with classroom teachers, who often feel overwhelmed by the computer and new software and applications. Perhaps Global SchoolNet could create a professional network of teachers doing some online collaboration project, or sponsor more regional projects so that more teachers could view and partake in the benefits of such collaboration.