The
STAR-W Writing Prompt Story
Art
Wolinsky
awolinsky@3dwriting.com
Teachers
at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School Complex in Atlantic
City have created hundreds of online writing prompts and knowledge
hunts that allow students to type information online and submit
their work to the teacher via e-mail with a simple click of a
button.
This
has been made possible by the New Jersey Department of Education's
STAR-W grant program http://www.state.nj.us/njded/techno/starw/abstract.htm
. STAR-W provides funding for equipment, intense sustained
professional development for teachers and administrators, along
with the on-site and online support of a STAR-W mentor.
Unlike
some grants that provide significant funding for schools that
result in outcomes that are questionable or can only be duplicated
by spending big bucks, much of our focus has been on the creation
of activities that can be used by others or duplicated with minimal
expense. The writing prompts and many other web-based activities
are prime examples of that philosophy in action.
The
writing prompts and knowledge hunts work off of templates I have
developed that are processed by freeware CGI scripts that I have
installed on the STAR-W server. Teachers use Macromedia
Contribute software to edit the templates with the ease of word
processing and then publish them with a click of a button.
The
CGI scripts are at the heart of the activities. They are a routine
part of commercial web sites. Anytime you fill in an online
form, you are probably using a CGI script. You may be surprised
to find out that most school web servers are capable of providing
that same kind of functionality to teachers in their district.
It
is unfortunate that lack or a vision for their use, the lack of
knowledge to implement them, and security concerns all act to
prevent this valuable tool from reaching the hands many teachers. For this reason, the CGI scripting and Contribute are not
the focus of this article. If you are interested in that
process, feel free to contact me via the e-mail address in this
article. This article will deal with a simpler process that can
be implemented by the classroom teacher.
STAR-W
gave me the time and funding to put my vision and my web skills
to work. When I was hired as the STAR-W mentor for Atlantic
City, I was given the rare opportunity to implement my technology
vision, part of which was the writing prompt activities that teachers
have created.
Marilyn
Cohen, the district Technology Supervisor, whose vision and mine
are similar, provided me with the support and freedom to create
the templates and create a web work environment for the teachers. She discovered Macromedia Contribute that allowed teachers
to implement and create web pages and edit my templates with the
ease of word processing. Marilyn's discovery of Contribute
was the spark that ignited a fire under all of us in the program.
Since
the late 70's when I started working with computers, I felt that
teachers would never truly embrace technology until they had control
over it and it was as transparent as word processing. It has been
a long road, but this past year, with the help of STAR-W funding,
great teachers, administrative support, and Macromedia Contribute,
the teachers at MLK have taken almost complete control of the
web site and turned it into a powerful tool for teaching and learning.
Lest
you think I am exaggerating, just visit the site at http://www.starw.org
and click on "Teacher Pages". When you get there,
keep in mind that everything you see on the teacher pages was
created and posted by the individual teachers. They can
work and post using their laptops from anywhere that has Internet
connectivity. They can even work off-line and then post their
work later.
Incidentally,
the 5th grade teachers just became part of the program this summer. During our 80 hours of summer training, the 3rd and 4th
grade teachers demonstrated more of the power of STAR-W, by taking
over mentor tasks and bringing the 5th grade teachers up to speed
quickly.
As
wonderful as this was, it was still obvious to me that this particular
method could not be scaled up quickly enough to make any kind
of significant difference in other schools. Some schools
lack the vision, the technology, or the expertise to implement
this kind of program. Some schools that might have the
vision might not have the budget to purchase Contribute, train
the teachers, and support their efforts. They certainly
didn't have the funding and access to technology that STAR-W offered
us.
I
needed a way for schools that didn't have the funding resources
to duplicate what STAR-W was allowing us to do. I needed
a way that teachers anywhere would be able to implement this same
kind of activity within their own classroom relatively independently
of district technical support. I needed something that
could grow from the grass roots, but could be implemented on a
large scale if the district had the desire to do so, and I needed
something that could be done with little or no cost.
Enter
ETTC (Educational Technology Training Center) and another example
of the ripple effect of STAR-W. Largely because of my work
with the STAR-W grant, the Southern Regional ETTC asked me to
develop a two-day Language Arts Institute.
I
designed a workshop that consists of four basic components.
• Exploration of Language Arts online resources and the STAR-W web
site.
• The creation of interactive web-based quizzes, puzzles, and activities
to promote literacy.
• The introduction of hypertext narrative writing for students using
3DWriter, a freeware hypertext editor I created to focus on 21
st century writing. http://www.3dwriting.com
.
• The creation of interactive writing prompts and knowledge hunts
using CGI templates and Response-O-Matic.com.
With
this new workshop on the horizon, I was provided with an outlet
to test an idea I had for scaling up and disseminating the STAR-W
writing prompt concepts.
Response-O-Matic.com
is a web site. that allows teachers to develop their own interactive,
online forms and use the scripts installed on their server to
run them. I've used the site in past workshops and MLK
teachers were introduced to it by Jamie Saponaro, STAR-W mentor
for the Stafford Township district.
Response-O-Matic
allows people to create forms and store them anywhere they like. It could be on a floppy disk, a classroom computer, a person
web site., or a school web site. When a user clicks the
form's Submit button, the information is transmitted to the Response-O-Matic
web server, processed, and sent as an e-mail to the teacher.
It's
a free site, but as the old adage goes, "There's no such thing
as a free lunch." The price you pay and that you should
be aware of, is that when the page is processed, the user is presented
with a screen that shows what is being mailed along with a link
to the STAR-W site and an ad from Response-O-Matic.
Anyone
can go to Response-O-Matic and use their templates, but most people
will have difficulty creating and implementing what they need. Since their templates are very generic, they must be modified
to be of any real use. The vast majority of people simply
use it as a feedback form or a way of collecting simple data on
a web site. As they stand, they don't lend themselves to
seamless integration or as a daily teaching and learning tool.
I
modified the Response-O-Matic html code considerably in a way
that makes it useable by anyone without any behind the scenes
editing. Using Microsoft Word, my template can be used
to create activities seamlessly and quickly. Incidentally,
you aren't restricted to Word. You can use any product
capable of editing web pages. I chose to use Word in this
example, because it is the simplest and most familiar tool to
the majority of teachers.
Making
picture prompts is a simple task. Click on a link to visit the the appropriate page depending on whether you are using Macromedia Contribute or Microsoft Word.
Writing
prompts have been a significant of our work, but they are only
the tip of the iceberg. This summer the MLK teachers planned
a large-scale project to reduce the amount of bullying and violence
in schools. This allowed us to put training and technology
use in the context of our Bullying to Buddies project.
They created WebQuests, iMovies, Kid Pix activities, about fifty
reading and writing activities using the writing prompt templates
( http://www.starw.org/castaldi/b2bbooks.htm
), and much more.
Melissa
Inferrera was an MLK STAR-W teachers whose position was cut due
to dropping enrollment, but in part because of her STAR-W training,
armed with her STAR-W electronic portfolio, she immediately secured
a new position teaching 1st grade. She stopped in to visit
with us a few times during our summer and about a week after this
summer's training ended I got an e-mail from her about a day that
she wasn't feeling well. Instead of hitting the beach or shopping
she wrote, "All day today (and I mean literally all day), I worked
on Picture Prompts. I ended up creating 4 Picture Prompts
for the months September through June for a grand total of...drum
roll please...40 picture prompts!" http://www.starw.org/infererra/shanerfirstgrade.htm
Melissa
is hardly the exception when it comes to the STAW-W teachers at
MLK, because of their dedication, technology leadership, access
to and control of technology in their classes, all of the teachers
are creating online learning activities and experiences for students
that extend and enrich the curriculum in ways they never imagined.
I
hope this writing prompt template can help bring a little of the
STAR-W magic to your classroom.
