|
|
|
Archive:
KIDLINK
|
|
KIDLINK in the CLASSROOMS
Compiled by PURPOSE The KIDLINK concept is easy, but making it work in the classroom is another matter. The purpose of this document is to tell what other teachers want to get out of our projects, and about some of of the practical "tricks" that they are successfully using to involve their students. Since there are no major differences between KIDS-91, KIDS-92, KIDS-93, and so forth, we have included comments relating to all these projects. Please send us a report about the "tricks" that you find useful in your school to help us update this guide on a regular basis. The best is to send a description of your experiences directly to the KIDLEADER discussion list (all participating teachers should read the things being discussed there). The next best is to send it as a private message to me at
opresno@kidlink.org WHAT TEACHERS DO AND THINK Canada Sherry Franklin and Martin McCormack are teachers at the Hopewell School, in the center of Ottawa the capital of Canada: "There are about 800 students from 4 year old kindergarten to grade 8. We are called a dual track school in that all of the students are English but most of them are learning in French. These students, who are learning French, start in 5 year kindergarten. They come to school for 1/2 the day and the teacher speaks to them in French. By the time they are 13 years old they are bilingual. We are involved in recycling and would be very interested in telling you what we are doing and we would like to hear from students what they are doing. We have a very active science programme and would like to work with any group interested in this area. We read about a group interested in NASSA. We would like to hear from you. Our French classes would like to communicate with anyone wanting to speak in French. There are about 50 students from grade 4 to grade 7 wanting to communicate. We can do this almost every afternoon and look forward to hearing from you." Czechoslovakia Milan in Prague wrote this in early 1991: "Here are some details on sampling, methodology and further plans in country where is English not native language. The responses from our kids will be divided methodologically: Methodology A:
Mark Wolfe at Zakladni Skola Omska in Prague: "The entire structure of the society is in the process of changing, and cultural attitudes are being forced to accommodate the virtual tidal wave of capitalism, tourism, and general Westernism that's rushing into the country (not a few people were made upset by the introduction of COMPUTER into the womb-like, un-automated environment of our school). I believe that my 10-15 year-olds could present an excellent perspective on this situation to both children and adults alike. England Mike Burleigh UBJVM6Q@UK.AC.BBK.CU from "Cedar class" at Oldfield House school, not far from Hampton Court Palace near the river Thames outside London writes: We have been using electronic mail since 1989 and have learned the importance of trying to building a good name for: courtesy:... always try to answer messages sent directly to you. reliability:.try to build a reputation for regular exchanges with twinned schools or contributions to 'learning circles' (clusters of schools involved in projects). quality:.....the children should understand that their messages must read well and should attract the interest and imagination of the reader. A lively and well prepared set of answers to the KIDLINK four questions will increase the likelyhood of receiving responses. helpfulness:.The Internet where we all meet is a 'living database', ask a question and you will find many people prepared to help you therefore try to reinforce this by offering support yourself when you can. Germany 13 year old Kerstin Battel, a student at Caecilienschule(Gymn.) in Oldenburg, recently wrote the following in KIDCAFE: "I write this letter in my school. Every Monday and Friday a computer meeting.It's very interesting, to write people all in the world." Volker Ulle (Langenhagen, Germany): "I think it's a great idea to collect a worldwide 'childrens-view' of our time. And to collect children's hopes and desires all over the world to get a cross-section of children's life in many countries. And through the responses perhaps bild up the imagination of a 'global village' in the childrens minds." Norway At Moland Comprehensive School, two 15-year-old boys with a strong interest in computers have been appointed KIDLINK coordinators. They are given one full day per week for their job. Functions: help teachers introduce KIDLINK to several classes, enter and send responses, handle technical problems, etc.. Hallvard Rydland - teaching the 6th grade at Knarvik elementary school - offers the following practical advice: "Lots of children in this project have found a key-pal or a pen-pal or a friend. Lots of children have experienced the excitet feeling when they receive a letter from someone out there. And ... some children have never experienced this ..... What can we do to help them to get an answer to their letters? At my school some children are in this situation. They are very eager to write, and some of them work really hard with their letters. Maybe there are other teachers somewhere having the same "problem"? My idea is: If you gave me some names of your "have-got-no-answer-chil- dren", and I gave you some of mine, maybe we could put them in touch ...... It's not my idea to force them to be friends, but we could guide them along the road .... as we do in school ...." Italy Ivana e Gianfranco lives in Bologna in Italy. She writes: "I am a teacher of English. I'd like my pupils to exchange messages with children of the same age (11-14) in English." Russia Maria Chermnykh is a teacher at Protvino Lyceum, a school of a new type. These are her experiences: "I teach mostly 7th and 8th grades. It wasn't easy to involve students into the project at first. Some of them after answering 4 questions were waiting for the answers and when the answers didn't come, they were disappointed and didn't want to write any more. But as time passed and they saw that those who were active and persistently wrote letters, got the answers, they began to work. And now we've established communication with many schools in different countries. Some students, such as Nadin Zakamskaya, Lena Rykova, Ann Mukhina, Maxim Svyato, Kirill Lugovsky have got about 50 mails. We receive many letters every day. As you know the USSR was a rather closed country and we didn't know much about life in other countries. And now it's like reading an interesting book. Kids from the US, France, Germany, Norwegia, Japan, Italy, write us about their schools, their hobbies and even give recipes of their national cuisine. When we studied the theme Christmas (for the first time), this year, we could see all the traditions and the way of celebrating it in the letters of american children. That was very useful. The next very important reason why we greet this project is an opportunity for our students to practice their English. And we see such a great success due to our corresponding. New our students are able to write letters without teachers help. We often do it at the lessons. They even try to speak English and that's very important for us. I think our teaching foreign languages never used it during there life. But today everything changes in our country. And we seem not to live separately from the world any more. And it's great. United States Paul Riding is a teacher at Colonial Heights Junior School in Virginia, United States. His subject is Computer Literacy, but he is also the educational computer coordinator for the school. In the summer of 1990 he wrote: "With the addition of Social Studies teachers to our growing group of intrepid explorers, we plan on implementing cultural studies of the countries involved, i.e. language, climate, economy, type of governmental structure, educational opportunities, ect. "English department will continue as the *writing* center (p.s. a few students have received and/or sent letters to Norway since May 13. Neat stuff). Also, with the BARK project involving the Science department, we will try to tie in environmental issues along with the social ones. So, we'll try to have a truly interdisciplinary curriculum next year." Joe Serico is District Computer Teacher in Paterson (New Jersey, USA), a large urban city on the east coast (17 miles from NYC). There are over 20,000 students in the school district: "This year 10 of of our schools actively participated in the KIDLINK project. I would like to tell everyone how one school incorporated the project into their curriculum and then ask for a favor. Mrs. Rankin's 8th grade class at School #18 made KIDS-92 a continuing year long project. The class has access to 10 Apple II computers equipped with Appleworks. Each student is given their own personal data disk. The students use Appleworks to write all KIDCAFE letters and save them to their disk. This allows mass mailing using PROTERM (an Apple II communications package). This saves online time and money. The students constructed a folder/mailbox to save any incoming correspondence to each of them. Every couple of days a different student is selected as the mailperson(mail retriever) and scans the school's mailbox for letters to their class. They retrieve the letters and print them out. They are then distributed to the students to save in their mailbox. In addition to just participating in KIDCAFE. The students were to select a country or state that the class has corresponded with and right a report on his/her country or state. They were allowed to use normal research methods, but were encouraged to get information from their keypals. The report included maps, climate, population, government and history. These reports are all due on Friday, June 10, 1992. In addition to these reports, the students were asked to gather recipes from all their keypals. These recipes were collected and put into an Applworks database. These recipes are to be used for an end of the year International Food Festival and Celebration. The students will be doing all the cooking themselves and invitations were sent out to parents and Paterson officials. The reports will be on display as well as a visual display containing parts of each student report in a Hypermedia setup using Hyperstudio for the Apple IIgs. The students would like to demonstrate KIDLINK to all the people attending their festival. So this is where the favor comes in.....please send a message to them......directly to this E-mail address or thru KIDCAFE ...put School #18 in the subject...just saying hello. Joan Button is the the Computer Coordinator for a small school district (1000 students, K - 12) located in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State in the USA. She writes: "We have a 5th grade class that has just answered the four questions and they want to take part in the "War Concerns and Reactions project". We also have a high school class that wants to communicate with the young men from Haifa, Isreal--especially since the war has started. They did send one of them a message last Friday and another group in the same class will try to send a second message to Isreal later today. I would like to be in touch with a 3rd grade class from Japan. Last summer I attended a "Teacher's International Exchange" Conference at Stanford University in California between 20 American educators and 20 Japanese educators. But I was unable to connect with an elementary teacher that had access to telecommunications. I have a 3rd grade class here that is ready and waiting for a Japanese partner. Could you help us out?" This report comes from Harold Miller at Seabury Hall, Maui, Hawaii: "Our school (300 kids) has a daily "newspaper" called NOON SCOOPS..any material submitted to the main secretary by 10:45 am is xeroxed and collated and put on the tables in the dining room during the 2 lunch periods. I often submit email prinuts to Noon Scoops and invite students to participate in responding to the email. Works well. And from Sally Laughon at NorthCross School in Roanoke (VA): "I have taken a huge section of the hallway wall across from my classroom and posted KIDLINK messages by country of origin. Banners and signs highlight sections of the wall. Banners, signs, messages and maps occupy another section slightly apart from KIDLINK. I tape the sheets only from at the top so so there may be a small "pad" of messages available under countries with prolific contributions. The messages start at the top of a comfortable eye level for high school students and extend down to the floor. I had to overlap the messages after I ran out of wall space! Students, teachers, parents, visitors, coaches from other schools, board members and _especially_ students browse this board constantly. I recently added a map of Kibbutzim to the messages from Israel. The maps add color and provide an initial interest in THE WALL of 1991!" Cissy Myers, Language arts teacher, Morningside Middle School North Charleston, South Carolina (from The Instructor Magazine): " .... I sent six to seven kids at a time to Jeanne in the computer lab, where she helped them enter their responses into the computer. A few days later, the first respondents discovered that they had gotten a flood of pen-pal mail (53 pages of responses!) from other kids around the world. Students took turns reading the responses aloud, in groups and in pairs, awed by the content and variety of the responses. Paul, a 12-year-old boy from Dublin, Ireland, shared his love of choral singing and his desire to become a doctor; 14-year-old Vazgen from Yervan, Armenia, wants the world to be without wars and borders. The children were especially fascinated to discover the similarities and differences between their responses and those of their international counterparts. For example, my students discussed problems associated with drugs and violence, while the European children were most concerned about pollution and ecology. My students were also pleasantly surprised that children from foreign lands wrote and spoke English." Barb Manchee of the Pittsford Middle School in the state of New York: We bring the kids into the library and project the computer screen onto a 25" monitor. We turn up the modem so the kids can hear the dialing and their faces light-up! When they see teir messages being sent out they get so excited. It would be great to get some messages coming in too. OTHER IDEAS 1) Introduce class to electronic networking. Define basic terms such as modem, communications software, parameters, online, e-mail, computer conferencing, chat, uploading, downloading, porting, moderating, lurking, etc. Show class how modem is connected to computer and how to call up communications software. Log onto a local computer network. 2) Have teams of students choose particular countries to study. Have each team research various aspects of their country (ie, its climate, language, economy, governmental structure, educational opportunities, etc) and report back to the rest of the class. 3) Compile a "KIDLINK Almanac" based on your students' research. Perhaps use map software as part of the project. 4) Let your students enter their own responses on computers to the four KIDLINK questions and save the text in ASCII format instead of letting others (you?) do it for them. 5) Encourage your students to develop "keypal" relationships with other students from around the world through KIDCAFE. It is often better to do this by responding to other students's requests than by sending "Hi, please write to me" messages. Some students will always experience difficulties in getting others to write to them for various reasons. Consider teaming them up with 'successful' kids whenever this happens. Jerry Guy (jguy@pro-finders.cts.com) writes: On my system the kids have individual email accounts but the do not all suscribe to RESPONSE, KIDCAFE, KIDS-ACT, or KIDPROJ. This system has set up a conference for each of these lists. All the kids access this conference area to read the high volumne stuff. Right now I have only 4 kids on the system and I've had to unsub from the KIDCAFE until I can find more money. This forces my users to find direct email contacts. Hopefully I'll find some a$$i$tance here this year and add KIDCAFE back in. Till then the kids are happy with e-mail, the RESPONSE, and KIDS-ACT. I keep the last 1000 entries in each list available to each user so they can search for a contact whos response was posted a long time ago. FEEDBACK FROM STUDENTS
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 1991 20:08:22 MET The pupils in class 6A at Knarvik elementary school in Norway have made their answers to 4 questions about the KIDLINK-work. The students have been working in the KIDLINK-project since early spring 1991. When they have finnished the 6th grade, they go to another school for the last 3 years (see answer 4). I found the answers so positive and interesting that I wanted to share them with you. The questions:
(1) What is your opinion of the KIDLINK-work? Each student worked out his / her own answers to the four questions. Then they got together in groups of five students. The group then worked out an answer where they incorporated all the different "meanings". Here is a summary of the answers:
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1992 22:42:00 EST Rebecca: I will try to answer your questions: It becomes ever more apparent that in order for keypal relationships to work, teachers must commit a great amount of time to typing the messages for students. This is true because of both equipment and time constraints Being a computer exploratory teacher means that the longest time a student comes to my class is nine weeks. Sixth graders come for six weeks Telecommunications is only a small part of the curriculum. Does anyone have ideas about how to maximize participation while minimizing time? These are issues I think everyone is struggling with. ... Here are some thoughts from my perspective and what I tried to do: 1. I TRIED to get the kids to write their messages on specially printed KidGrams. The intent was that we could set up a sort on paper mail system which the kids would then key the messages to disk and then they would be sent out en masse at a meeting or by a teacher. Well... this idea was a bust. 2. We started clubs here at both middle schools and I was hoping for greater interest/particpation but these are kids and they go 90 MPH all the time and getting them to organize for _anything_ is a minor miracle. 3. Obviously getting the senders to put the School/Students name in the subject of KIDCAFE mail to other kids is the best solution but not frequently observed. The kids from Protvino Russia had the best record in the regard as far as I can tell. Just like we tell kids to try and find a keypal amongst the EXISTING kids, I think we local users have to do a better job of insisting that the kids use better (standard) format for KIDCAFE message subjects. 4. Another thought that I have will require some more analysis but I am wondering just how many messages there were sent to KIDCAFE addressed to ANYONE or people looking for Keypals. With all those messages in there, it makes it tough for the kids to see that the answer is NOT to write another pleading "WRITE TO ME" message, but that they should write to someone who has already asked for a pal. I almost think it might be a good rule of thumb... After you send your answers to RESPONSE, you have to write a personal greeting addressed to a particular individual who is already in the KIDCAFE. That might cut down on frustration as well as repetative pleading messages for pals (and the workload associated with posting them). 5. I am in the process of doing some analysis which should give some quantfication to the assumptions in #4 above but I am also doing some other things. I am just now working on determining the most prevalant days of the week and local times for most postings to RESPONSE. I expect to do this for KIDCAFE as well. When complete, it should tell us the best times to check for mail or also the best time to get in early and get your message on the top of the message pile. I will post the raw numbers here shortly. Hoi Hope a long answer was OK. Mark |
 Back
For more information about the Kidlink organization
please write to kidlink-info@kidlink.org.
Web version maintained by Patricia A. Weeg
patti@globalclassroom.org - Updated January 4, 1998.
Copyright ® 1997 Kidlink . All rights reserved. |
