Our organization, the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, has been working for the past two years to use blogging technology to bring middle school students from rural and urban school districts together into a shared writing space. The two focus communities were Holyoke, a city center that has struggled in many areas over the last decade, and Athol, a rural site that is geographically isolated and, like Holyoke, is struggling. This year, we have 15 teachers (who are not technology teachers) from six different school districts and more than 200 students involved and we would like to bring our project to the next level. We have also moved into using our blogs (which are closed to the public to protect student privacy) for sharing science experiment data and reflections, as well as some traditional English Language Arts endeavors.

The blogging platform that we have been using (Manila) is too complicated and doesn't approximate the social connections that we envisioned as part of the project. We hope to find some better tools that can break down the geographic and socio-economic walls that often separate our students and find ways to allow them to understand the diverse lives of others through writing and activities.

One of our secondary missions is to bring technology to school districts which are struggling and cannot allocate resources for professional development .The Making Connections project has demonstrated some of the ways this can be done but we would like to have partners that can help shape and guide us into emerging social networking platforms.

WHAT WE NEED:

Our main needs are access to a social networking platform that is safe and secure; technical expertise to solve potential problems that arise from working at a variety of different school sites; and funding to provide for professional development for teachers in the project who are NOT technology proficient.

Location