September/October

As a Redwood Writing Project Coordinator for a school partnership with Peninsula School, I met with the Superintendent/Principal, two teachers, and RWP Director, Sue McIntire, at a staff meeting to discuss the needs of the teachers related to the teaching and learning of writing. Both teachers identified the implementation of writing workshop as a priority. In addition, Linda Stewart, teacher of grades 5-8, was interested in using i-Movie to post student work in a blog. It was decided at that time that work during the first semester would focus on writing workshop (while TC Emily Gibson was available to present) and the second semester would focus on using technology in the writing classroom.

Having just completed a summer of ATI, I was keen to see what Google Apps for Educators would look like set up in a school. I was curious if 5th-8th graders would post to Google Docs and respond to one another's work in the same way we had at our institute. I liked the idea of setting each student up with his/her own e-mail account to use at school. I wondered how students would respond to designing blogs. However, this idea was more appealing to me than it was to the classroom teacher. She was hesitant about privacy/safety issues. Her students were already posting work to a "Shares" folders on her networked computers. She was satisfied with this system.

Instead, we decided to focus on using I-Movie as a platform to publish student writing of some form or another and then post those movies to a blog at the end of the school year. Harriet Watson's digital story workshop would provide the foundation for this work. Linda was familiar with my "Modest Technology Project" from ATI 2007 (Building Bridges to a Healthy World) and was eager to learn the process herself.

For me, it looked like "Modest Technology Project II" would look similar to "Modest Technology Project I." Rather than designing the blog and content myself, I would help another teacher explore and learn the process based on her classroom context.