Our project connects students from urban and rural school districts through a Weblog-based writing space with the goal of creating an online community of learners empathetic to the experiences of others.
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.
For the past two years, we have been lucky to have received technology grants from the National Writing Project. The $15,000 a year grant has provided funds solely for professional development of the teachers in the program and this has meant summer courses, Saturday sessions and professional development days during the year. The funding from the National Writing Project is now winding down and we are seeking new partnerships to help grow and sustain our project.
Here is how we see the model of funding that we have used being extended into the future:
We anticipate the possibility of receiving about $7,000 from the National Writing Project for the 2007-2008 school year and would use that as matching funds.
Our main obstacles are mostly technical and administrative, in that some of the teachers in our program have problems gaining access to computers in labs and some school administrators are worried about the "MySpace" effect of social networking platforms.
One of our missions in Making Connections is to demonstrate the effective and positive use of technology to connect students in safe and learning environment for meaningful goals. We also struggle with integrating technology into a curriculum in some schools that is geared ONLY for standardized testing and so part of our mission is to document what we are doing and share it forward as a model for others.
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.
Our milestones so far:
The key milestones for next year are:
The Making Connections project is still in its infancy and we would love to forge new partnerships to grow, expand and move us into new directions. Our overriding goals are to provide middle school teachers with an understanding of technology integrated into the curriculum across the disciplines; provide students with ways to communicate and reach out to other students from different socio-economic communities; and educate school officials on the benefits of technology beyond using computers for standardized testing machines. We see real benefits when students can connect with others.
In the past two years, we have made strides in these areas with help from the National Writing Project, but now, we seek to find a new technology platform that will engage our students even more. We look to your organization to help provide us with guidance and support for our endeavors, as we believe that middle school students are at the ideal of age of openness, willingness to experiment, and excited to connect with others outside of their closed communities through technology.
Here are some links that might provide more insight into the work we are doing:
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Kevin Hodgson
Western Massachusetts Writing Project
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Comments
$2k social networking platform
The project sounds great! I'm a huge advocate of teaching responsible content creation to children / teenagers, and I have the "why social networking isn't evil" conversation far too often with the unenlightened.
Have you worked with a technology consulting firm on your budget? I ask because $2k could be low or high depending on how in-depth your social networking needs are. If you were willing to work with the features available in a CMS such as Drupal, $2k could cover it, but you won't be able to develop *any* custom coded solutions within that budget. That said, there's a lot that's possible without stretching the existing abilities of the Drupal CMS too far.
I work with Grassroots.org; we're developing a free nonprofit toolbox that includes Drupal-based CMS tools, and it might be possible to customize that slightly to meet your needs. If you're interested in checking out the project, our NetSquared profile is here: Grassroots.org Nonprofit Toolbox
Good luck! We need more people teaching kids how to write, publish, and connect to others in meaningful ways using emerging technology tools.
As a former rural kid...
I appreciate the initiative! I think it's a really excellent proposal and I'm sure folks in NetSquared will have lots of ideas for social networking platforms (I know of three or four that could work great, in particular Moodle). I like the local focus of the project and the pedagogical approach to student engagement and collaboration.
--ivan (quixotic1.com/Genocide Intervention Network)