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This site is primarily designed for K-12 educators who are implementing service projects in an educational setting. However, anyone interested in community service or experiential education will be pleased to find a wealth of relevant information in this site.

The Resource Kit contains information that will be applicable to people with a range of technology skills or levels of Internet access. This kit contains annotations and links to over 30 carefully-selected WWW sites that can be useful in planning, implementing, and evaluating service-learning projects at any grade level.

To give you a better idea of how teachers might use this site, please read the following scenarios.

Fire Prevention	A scenario for an elementary classroom.
Peace Now	A scenario for a middle school classroom.
Book Buddies	A scenario for a high school classroom.

Fire Prevention

Note: Clicking on a link will take you to a description of the website in the Resource Kit.

Ms. Rodriguez is a teacher in a fourth-grade bilingual classroom in South Texas. Her students have become very interested in fire prevention, especially since a family in the community recently had a fire burn down their home. Ms. Rodriguez and the students decide they want to use fire prevention as a theme for a service-learning project for her class. She decided to use this website to help her with this unit.

Being fairly proficient with technology, she visits the on-line Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills to review what curriculum objectives she might cover in her unit. By browsing the on-line curriculum and database of lesson ideas, she formulates a list of objectives she wants her students to learn in this unit.

Realizing that others may have done similar projects, she decided to send an e-mail out to the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse mailing list to see if any other teachers have ideas on possible service-projects that involve fire prevention education.

Next, Ms. Rodriguez asks her students to brainstorm ways that they might be able to prevent other families from becoming fire victims. Popular ideas were putting together a brochure on fire safety and asking local firefighters to speak at the school. However, after some discussion, the students decided that educating others on fire safety would be the most effective project. After more enthusiastic, guided class discussion, the students decided that they wanted to write and perform fire safety skits for younger students in their school. Ms. Rodriguez thought this would be a great project that would integrate many content areas, and especially help her students hone their oral language skills.

Ms. Rodriguez then wrote some more detailed objectives and lesson plans that would tie this project into her language arts, science, and social studies curriculum. She used the PiVit software that she downloaded from the University of Michigan website to help her plan her unit.

One lesson involved students doing research on the WWW on fire prevention. She decided to make a research-focused webpage using the Filamentality tool. Her students would use this webpage as a launching pad for their research.

(end scenario)

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Peace Now

Mr. Hanson is not crazy about using technology...he's been teaching for fifteen years, and has survived til now without it. However, his school recently got "wired" and the administration is pressuring all teachers to use the Internet in their classrooms. In fact, his principal has required every teacher to document at least one curriculum-based classroom activity that utilizes the Internet. Mr. Hanson teaches middle school Social Studies, and decides that the Internet might have some resources to help him teach his unit on World War II.

In the past, Mr. Hanson usually taught the students about various aspects of WWII, using the textbook as a primary source for information. The students culminate the unit by writing a report on some aspect of the war. It's almost the end of the school year, and Mr. Hanson needs something that'll catch the students' attention and keep them focused on school rather than the upcoming summer vacation.

He's heard his colleagues gushing about how students get very excited when their work is published on the WWW. On a friend's recommendation, he checks out a student-published electronic magazine called the Junior Journal. He's really impressed with the quality of the student writing. While discussing this website with his colleagues, they realize that the writing is probably so high quality because students a.) really care about the topic they are writing about, and b.) are writing for a worldwide audience instead of just the teacher. Mr. Hanson decides he will seek the assistance of the school's technology coordinator to help him publish his student's reports on the WWW. He hopes that doing so will get them motivated.

When he presents the idea to his students, most of them get excited by the idea, especially when Mr. Hanson (and the technology coordinator) show the Junior Journal to the students as a model of what can be done on the WWW. The students, excited by the prospect of being "published" authors, launch on their research for their reports. They decide that the report will serve as resource for other kids who are researching the same topic. A few weeks into the unit, a handful of students complain that the textbook and library holdings aren't sufficient for them to complete their reports.

The technology coordinator offers her help, and suggests that Mr. Hanson look into the Electronic Emissary as a way to gather information (via e-mail exchanges) from an expert on World War II. Mr. Hanson gets some of his computer guru students to explore the website and search for experts on this topic. To their delight, they find two people who are very knowledgable about WWII Germany and are willing to exchange approximately five e-mail messages a week! At the suggestion of the technology coordinator, the students also check out Ask An Expert, and are pleased to find the e-mail address of a Holocaust survivor who's willing to share her experiences with the class.

Mr. Hanson is pleased by the students' excitement, but a bit overwhelmed by the technology overload. However, the technology coordinator offers to help manage students' inquiries with their "telementors," and the research begins!

The access to real experts and survivors of WWII helps the project take on a new meaning. Students begin questioning not only the facts of this particular war, but they also start reflecting more and more on issues of peace and justice in general. This contact, combined with the prospect of publishing their work, makes the students feel like real investigators, reflecting and thinking about big issues, even when they're not in class.

Mr. Hanson can't believe how a few simple tools can open up so many doors for his students. Now that he's seen a concrete use for technology, he looks forward to learning more.

(end scenario)

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Book Buddies

Ms. Joshi is a high school resource teacher. Her students cover a wide range of reading levels and social skills. Feeling at a loss for ideas, whe decides to use ProjectMaker to help her brainstorm activities for her students. This tool assists her in planning projects that motivate and challenge her students. Specifically, ProjectMaker helps her realize she needs to do activities that engage students in practicing their reading and writing skills while also getting a chance to socialize a bit.

She realizes that mentoring younger (elementary) students in reading--being "Book Buddies" with them--would be an ideal activity for her more high-performing special education students. When she mentions this idea to a few of her students, they get very excited. However, when she looks into logistical issues such as transportation and time, the outlook looks increasingly grim. The students are already pulled out of class so often that the principal is reluctant to send them to other campuses to be Book Buddies for younger students.

Then, a colleague tells Ms. Joshi about a "virtual book buddies" project called Side by Side that was done by students in Virginia. To her amazement and delight, she sees that students could indeed be Book Buddies thanks to the communications technology that the Internet offered. Her students could use e-mail from her classroom computer to communicate with elementary students all over the world! She spends much time over the next few months to research this project, talking to colleagues, and doing some more on-line investigating. Ms. Joshi realizes that the logistics of setting up such a project are challenging, but the potential outcomes are worth it.

During the summer, Ms. Joshi finds an elementary school in a neighboring state that is willing to participate in the project. She also finds some local volunteers that will help her train and monitor the resource students that would be involved in the project. In the fall, she starts a small pilot "Virtual Book Buddies" project with three of her resource students. These students are paired up with elementary students in another state. All participants read the same books, and then use e-mail to write back and forth about their predictions and opinions about the books. Her students are so happy to be participating in a service-learning project that helps them not only improve their reading and writing skills, but also did wonders for their self-esteem.

At the end of the semester, Ms. Joshi uses some evaluation instruments from UC-Berkeley's website to help her measure the progress of her students.

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Copyright 1999
Arati Singh
servicelearning@teachnet.edb.utexas.edu