[originaltext]Nicole: Tell me, how does a multimedia and maths teacher end up l

Nicole: Tell me, how does a multimedia and maths 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.
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.
Nicole: I would imagine that this project would be a great way for an English teacher to pursue various teach-ing goals and standards.
Irene: 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.
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 re-search fuller 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. Alter 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.
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 colour, animation, and anything that would draw the attention of a young reader. Webpages were created using FrontPage (a software program for designing web-pages). 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.
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.