[originaltext]Nicole: You’ve become widely known in the teaching community for

Nicole: You’ve become widely known in the teaching community for your fabulous collaborative Internet projects, several of which have won Miss Rumphius awards. How did you get started?
Susan: I had been a classroom teacher since 1970, mostly second grade. And I was very, very much into multicultural education. I did a lot of travelling, and I really enjoyed bringing things back from my travels and creating units around them; it made it more interesting for the children. When the Internet came, it was just a natural progression for me. It gave me the opportunity to really open the classroom walls, bring the world into the room, and collaborate with the global community.
Nicole: Were you always comfortable working with computers?
Susan: As of about 5 years ago, I was a computer phobic. If you think about the story of Sleeping Beauty, where she wanted every spindle destroyed... I wanted every computer destroyed! I was afraid of the computer! We were told we were getting two computers in the classroom, and I was devastated. "What am I going to do?" I asked myself, "Well, I better learn it." That’s when I discovered what was out there--teachers having websites and digital portfolios for their students. It gave me the hunger to learn and be a part of it. And then I became involved with collaborative internet projects. It was so exciting to be a part of something big, to have the children be producers of information. My dream was to do my own project, and I started thinking about what I could do, still being so new to it all. Having been a teacher for so many years, common sense told me: I just teach myself how.
Nicole: How did you jump that first hurdle?
Susan: I did my first project, which was called An Apple a Day. It was a very simple poetry project using different poetry formats. I wasn’t a very good Web designer at the time (although I did write my own HTML), but I had classes send me poetry and one picture, and I put it on a website for them. I couldn’t wait to get home and check my e-mail to see who wanted to Join and who was sending me in formation. It was the most exciting thing that ever happened in my professional career!
Nicole: How did things evolve from there?
Susan: When I started getting involved in this, we had two computers in the classroom, but they weren’t hooked up to the Internet. I wanted digital portfolios for my students, so I did the work at home and uploaded the files. Once a month, I would take the children on a field trip to the high school library where we would get to see our website. I also invited the parents to my house to show them their children’s work. I got a lot of congratulatory letters from the educational community and I would send them over to my administrator.
  One day my administrator said she wanted to see me. I figured they were firing me! I’ll never forget it. But she said, "Susan, what’s your motive? You’re doing so much with computers. What can we do for you?" I said. "I Just have a passion for this." She said, "Well, I think it’s wonderful. We’re giving you a phone line,"
It’s a great story! I started going to more technology conferences and writing. I wrote several artic]as for various online magazines, and I was getting awards for ray website and sharing this with my district. The year before last I was a part-time second-grade teacher and part-time computer resource person, and it just demanded too much time, This year I became the district computer teacher, and I love it.
Nicole: What are some persona] rewards of doing these projects?
Susan: Oh, I could go on forever about it. There is this class in Alabama that joined one of my projects with a school media specialist. She took a chance by joining, because the community really was very uncomfortable with the Internet. They’d heard a lot of bad stories; they didn’t want to get involved in it. She decided to take a risk anti had her children join; I think it was Frosty Readers. Well, when the parents saw it, they were so thrilled... It just changed their attitude completely!
  Then I had a class from a school in Canada that was so excited about being on a project that they purchased computers.
  So I really feel like these projects have had such a positive impact. To have such a positive influence on places that I haven’t been, people that I haven’t met. For me, it’s really the most rewarding part of my career.