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| Nicole: |
Tell me, how does a multimedia and math teacher end up leading a project that has students writing stories about local history? |
| Irene: |
My lab is the high school's multimedia lab. When developing my program, the district decided that they would like to have one room--my room--house all new technologies. So nine years ago, I received several scanners that, at the time, cost about $1100, and I wanted to have a project that put them to good use. I asked my students to look for really old pictures that maybe their grandparents or their parents had in their possession. The first pictures that a student brought in were in a box of maybe 80 photographs that her grandmother had in her attic. Some of the photos were over a hundred years old! There were photographs of football players, sports activities, old buildings--just wonderful pictures. The kids loved seeing grandma in a bathing suit! So, that's how the project started. We started scanning the photos and we built ourselves a database. The second year we did the same thing: we brought in more photos, and we continued to scan.
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| Nicole: |
So, how did the story writing component come about? |
| Irene: |
I'm an advocate of reading, having four of my own children. When they were younger I read to them all the time, and today they are all strong readers. I thought, wouldn't it be neat if one of the English teachers could have her students write stories that my students could associate with our old pictures. We could then build these stories into webpages and post them on the Internet. Our third graders have local history in their curriculum so I thought that we could gear the project to them.
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| Nicole: |
I would imagine that this project would be a great way for an English teacher to pursue various teaching goals and standards. |
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In our school district, we have major assignments for each course called benchmarks. One of our English teacher's benchmarks was a writing and research project. Thanks to Mrs. Happeny and her benchmark, we had about 100 students writing our stories that first year. Over the years, we have had so much success with this project that I think that we are going to do it again this school year.
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| Nicole: |
Tell me more about how this collaboration between the English students and the computer science students worked. |
| Irene: |
I had some historians come in and talk to the academic English students about local history. During these discussions, students asked questions about areas of interest. From there, students would research further and then write their stories. They had several weeks to do so. The English teacher gave them the option of writing in pairs, so they could be very creative. Once the stories were written, they were graded and then sent back to the students for revisions.
We then picked the best stories. It was really a great project thus far.
Next, we had a third-grade teacher look the stories over to make sure that the terminology wasn't too tough. After the stories were returned, they were sent to a historian who picked them apart detail by detail to make sure everything in the story was historically accurate. For example, "lights" was changed to "gaslights," and numbers were made more exact. With the Babe Ruth/Cricket Field stories, we worked with Elaine Conrad, one of our local historians. She found newspaper articles about the Babe Ruth ball game at Cricket Field that revealed all kinds of great details, like the number of people that attended the game, what street the homerun was hit to, and so on.
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| Nicole: |
And once the stories had been written, your computer science students had the job of illustrating them and making them into webpages? |
| Irene: |
Once I got the stories, I passed them out to groups of three to four students. At this point, I probably had about five stories that were really good.
Students were given the assignment to associate pictures with the stories. My students were told that the stories were going to be put on the Internet for young readers. The stories needed to have color, animation, and anything that would draw the attention of a young reader. Webpages were created using FrontPage (a software program for designing webpages).
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Much of the project was carried out by teams of students. Three students worked together to create the Wopsy Hotel story webpages.
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Students did all the tasks that go along with webpage creation. Since so many groups worked on each story, I brought in some elementary students and let them pick the webpages that they liked the best. That first year we posted four stories on the Internet.
It took us a whole year to do all this--research the stories, write the stories, illustrate the stories, and make the webpages.
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The Baker Mansion story is clearly written with third graders in mind!
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| Nicole: |
Now, what I thought was very neat is that in putting the stories on the Web, your students made them interactive. Tell me more about this. |
| Irene: |
My directions were to create webpages that would be exciting for third graders. I challenged my students by saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, let's make these stories interactive. Let's see if we can't somehow let students type in their own names so that they can become a character in the story." My kids are academic students, and we work with high-end technologies, so I had high expectations of them coming up with a solution. I had two students who figured it out. They taught their technique to me, and I taught it to the rest of the classes. So, when a third grader would read a story, they were asked to type in their names, the names of friends, and maybe the names of relatives. Then the story would incorporate those characters and put the names, usually in color, right in the story. The young students could either read their stories in class or print a copy and take it home so that they could read it to Mom and Dad.
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For the Mishler Theater story, like all of the stories, readers are prompted to supply information that will make them a main character.
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| Nicole: |
What has the response been from the younger children who have read the stories? |
| Irene: |
Oh, really great. The elementary teachers tell me that their students truly enjoy the stories. By chance, I just happen to have an e-mail that I received the other day. This is from somebody who came across the stories on the Internet. It says "To Mrs. Huschak and her technology class, just a note to thank you so much for the enjoyable story that my niece Tara and I were able to read, and of course print, about Fort Roberdeau. She is visiting this summer, and we now plan to visit the fort after reading the story. You have helped make her vacation more exciting. Thank you!" We often get these nice little letters--from people that just come across the website.
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| Nicole: |
How did this project interface with your teaching goals as a multimedia technology teacher? |
| Irene: |
Every story my students worked on required them to use different skills that I had taught them in the classroom. Creating webpages, cyber-searching, looking for and editing old pictures, (resizing them, making them look good for the webpages)--all the things that we do in the class go into this project. So, they incorporated all their skills into creating some quality webpages.
Also, they got to apply their skills to a real life situation. You know, I can teach them about vector and bitmapped graphics and how to use PhotoShop (a digital editing program), but with a project like this, they get to see the real reasons for learning these skills.
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| Nicole: |
I imagine that in this real-life context they are much more motivated. |
| Irene: |
Absolutely. They are very proud of their work. Kids often e-mail me after they have graduated to ask questions about their website or to tell me that they have shown their work to other people. They also tell me that they add the site address to their resumes.
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Fort Roberdeau tells a story about a young person whose family leaves home to live at Fort Roberdeau, where the father will work as a militiaman.
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| Nicole: |
Going back to the English students, what kind of guidelines were the students given in terms of incorporating the historical content into the stories? |
| Irene: |
Students were told to incorporate as much historical content as they could into the stories. The stories needed to revolve around a young person of that period so that readers could in turn become the main character of the story.
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| Nicole: |
How did the students research the local history? |
| Irene: |
Our local library has a Pennsylvania room that has volumes and volumes of information about Altoona and Blair County. When students couldn't find information there, they could seek answers from our network of historians. Some of the kids weren't very accurate with their details, but if we really liked a story because it was creative, we would give it to the historians and ask them to edit the story.
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| Nicole: |
Who came up with the story topics? |
| Irene: |
The first two times we did this project, the students and historians came up with the topics. The last year we did the project, I sent e-mail to our elementary teachers and asked them what they would like their students to read about. One of the suggestions was the origin of Altoona. For How Altoona Began we got the cutest story.
The students who wrote this story were very creative. They wrote it from the perspective of an alien given an assignment on a town called Altoona in the United States, on the Planet Earth. The alien needed to research why Altoona grew so quickly and became so prosperous in such a short amount of time.
Altoona was started when the railroad purchased the Robinson farm in 1849. The story needed pictures to show readers how the site of that farm looks today, so I sent students with digital cameras to take pictures of the original farm site--it's a now a Kaufmann Store.
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The History of Altoona is a wonderful example of the creativity that authors and Web designers put into this project.
Some of the photographs, like this one from The History of Altoona, were taken by students in their spare time using digital cameras.
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| Nicole: |
I love how they combined recent and old photographs, drawings, and clipart. Were you able to find essential pictures that were not in your database? |
| Irene: |
One really great story was set in 1891. It was about the Wopsy Hotel, a resort on the Wopsononock Mountain that burned down in the early 1900s. I loved this story but I didn't think that there was any way we were going to find pictures from 1891. I had the kids check out all our sources, and didn't one of the local historians have a whole collection of Wopsy pictures! We got beautiful pictures of the inside of the hotel. The story was written around a reunion, and the collection had an actual picture of a reunion! For the Cricket Field story, we needed a picture of the K4 railroad engine, but all of the photographs that we found were copyrighted so we couldn't use them. Mrs. Conrad had a photograph of the K4 that her son had taken. She gave us permission to use it. So when we didn't have the photographs we needed in our database, we asked our historians, and they always came through for us.
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Local historians provided many of the photographs for the stories, including this picture of the K4 railroad engine for the Cricket Field story.
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The second year that we did the project we weren't able to find any pictures to accompany one of the stories, so we had an art class do sketches for us.
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Art students lent a hand by generating beautiful illustrations when photographs could not be found. These two drawings are illustrations for the Allegheny Portage Railroad story.
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Using our digital camera, students often volunteered to go out on their own after school and take pictures of whatever we needed. They had taken so many really great pictures that we've started a database of recent pictures. One of our next projects is going to be a series of "then and now" photos.
Students found pictures, clipart, whatever they needed. For the Cricket Field story, one of my students found a cricket on the Internet, animated it, and put it on the page. Cricket Field was named after the game Cricket, so students also found an Internet image of two Cricket players. One of my students made a ticket for the game.
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| Nicole: |
In what ways were the students allowed to be creative and approach the project in their own way? |
| Irene: |
| All of the teachers involved gave the assignment saying, "Be as creative as you want, but be historically accurate." Kids are strong in different areas and, depending on what they liked and what their strengths were, they came up with different ideas. For the Allegheny Portage Railroad story, one of my students came up with a treasure chest that had gold coins in it, and I was absolutely amazed by his drawing. |
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One of my students wasn't real happy with the way the webpages were originally done and asked if he could try to make them work better. So, he redid the stories using a coding method called ASP. Now, the information does not stay permanently on the server, but only goes into the story that is being read.
I really stress teamwork in my class, and by the end of the school year, it's amazing how the students rely on each other's strengths. They know who the graphic artists are; they know who the designers are; they know who the leaders are.
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| Nicole: |
Who came up with the idea to animate some of the photographs? For example the Mishler Theater was animated to look as though it were on fire. |
| Irene: |
Students decide which pictures they want to animate. The Wopsy Hotel story has one of my favorite animations--it shows some gentlemen playing banjos. When I throw a project like this out to the students, I never know what to expect!
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Students came up with clever ways of animating photographs.
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| Nicole: |
Collaboration was clearly an important part of this project. Did your students need guidance to work well collaboratively? |
| Irene: |
Working together is a big part of my class from day one. The first day my students come to class I make them sit for five minutes and chat with one another.
Then I ask them questions about one another. Every other week I move their seats so they get to work with a different group of people. I also tell them that I won't answer questions unless they've already asked at least two people for help. I teach them that teamwork is very important when working with computers.
I always tell them, "If you have to struggle with a problem then you're not productive."
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| Nicole: |
Could you tell me a little bit about how you assess the students' work? |
| Irene: |
Quality is everything. It's a major part of the assessment for every project. The students also need to be part of the team. They need to be out there working--not just sitting around observing their teammates working. Time management is another important element. If a project is due today, I don't want it tomorrow. So a big part of students' grades come from quality of design, teamwork, and time management--you must produce to get the grade.
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| Nicole: |
Now, you weren't always a computer science teacher, right? |
| Irene: |
Well, my background is mathematics, but back in the early 80s, I was the only teacher in my school district who had taken any computer classes.
When my administrators told me that they wanted me to start teaching computer classes, I said, "No, I hate computers. I don't want to do it." Not really given a choice, I started teaching something that I absolutely hated but soon came to love teaching computer classes. I originally started with a few computer classes, but eventually they took over my whole day. So, I'm no longer a mathematics teacher but instead, a computer science teacher.
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| Nicole: |
Do you have any advice for teachers who might be somewhat tentative around computers? |
| Irene: |
Ask students for help! Today's kids are so knowledgeable about computers. I've been teaching computer science classes since 1981, so I have a good strong background. But technology changes so rapidly that I need my students' help. If I get new hardware or software in the classroom, I ask students to experiment with the new technology. Instead of me going through manuals page after page after page, which is so time consuming, I let my kids help me.
They love it! Kids love to help--with anything--they simply love to help. Whenever they get to help a teacher they get really excited. And when my kids help me learn something new about technology, the next year I have more information to pass on to my new students.
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