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WRITE to Care Framework: Writing and Reading Integrating Technology into Education to Make A Difference in Our World.

By Kristi Rennebohm Franz, Sunnyside Elementary School, USA.

" Children develop language through interaction...they learn to talk by talking to someone who responds…They must therefore learn to write by writing to someone who responds. It will perhaps be possible for us to create classroom communities within school communities in which writing matters because it's done for real reasons by real writers who ache with caring for real response."
- Mem Fox

INTRODUCTION
Since 1993, our primary class has been using email on iEARN and between classrooms in our own school to learn to read and write. We started with reading and writing just text email messages with local to global iEARN students and teachers and now have added website publishing, videotape production, and live video conferencing experiences. Our telecommunications reading, writing, and communication all are focused on exploring curricular topics. We discovered early in this journey that by having children share their classroom curricular experiences through local to global telecommunications, their learning took on energy and inquiry beyond what we had ever imagined. The classroom became a place of "turbocharged" teaching and learning because of being connected to the real world experiences of others with whom we shared a passion for learning as much as we could together!
In the journey of mentoring primary children's use of telecommunications to develop literacy skills, I have developed the WRITE to Care Framework: Writing and Reading Integrating Technology into Education. The purpose of this framework is to encourage children's literacy skill development while participating in meaningful local to global telecommunications projects that make positive differences in their school, community, region, state, country, and the world. We use the iEARN network to generate and participate in WRITE to Care curricular projects.

THE WRITE TO CARE FRAMEWORK
WRITE to Care Framework is a process for integrating literacy (reading, writing, and communication/technology) essential learnings across the curricula in elementary schools. This framework integrates 3 components of teaching and learning:

1. Literacy
2. Curriculum
3. Service Learning

Using the WRITE to Care Framework in the interactive telecommunications environment of iEARN:

• enables students to meet literacy, communication/technology and other content area educational standards
• enables teachers to teach to educational standards
• energizes teaching and learning of teachers and students

The WRITE to Care Framework enables meaningful curricular use of:

• email telecommunications
• web page authoring for sharing curricular projects among students and teachers
• videoconferencing between classrooms and schools

IMPLEMENTATION OF WRITE TO CARE FRAMEWORK
In the iEARN community, teachers around the world connect their classrooms of students to do common curricular projects in partnership with one another. The Global Art Project and the Water Habitat Project are iEARN projects. We have also shared our Puerto Rico Comfort Quilt Project, our Nicaragua Peace Corps World Wise Schools Partnership Project, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace and Friendship Project with other schools on iEARN.

We are finding that when children are writing and reading email on focused curricular topics in order to do collaborative service learning with local to global peers projects, they have a real life purpose and accelerated motivation to develop their literacy skills. They are caring more about writing, while writing about caring!

How and why do classroom curricular experiences, using the WRITE to Care Framework, provide a powerful process for children's literacy and communication development?

First, most children in the primary years have an innate sense of wanting to share what they know with others and learn about their world. When children have an opportunity to communicate with local to global peers as way of making connection to and learning about their world, they are eager to work on the necessary reading and writing skills that enable them to participate in that communication.

Second, when the children are writing about a curricular topic for which they have had meaningful learning experiences, they understand that the purpose of working on literacy skills is to be able to share those learning experiences that they know so well.

Third, the children are writing to known peers with an expectation that their writing will be read and that their writing will bring forth a reply and with telecommunications, the time frame for reply can be immediate. Instead of waiting weeks or months for responses by snail mail, they can have responses within a more immediate time frame, which enables children to have the context, content and purpose of their written messages intact when they receive a response.
Fourth, when the children receive a reply, it increases their motivation and understanding of how and why to work on reading skills, especially integrated semantic, syntactic and phonemic reading strategies, so that they can read the messages they receive. They want to know what their peers have to say. Because the email reply content is on a subject matter for which the children have background knowledge and because they know the text is going to be about a curricular context in which they have ownership and experiences, they access that prior knowledge and known context of what the email is about to predict words in the text.
Fifth, when children receive a reply from peers, those peers often tell them how much they learned from the messages that were sent. The text of reply email often affirms for children the value of the information and ideas that they have communicated. The children realize that their efforts to write about what they know are appreciated and important to others beyond their classroom. When a child realizes that what they know is valued by others, they become motivated to continue learning and writing about the curricular topic.

Sixth, the reply messages often invite further inquiry that inspires ongoing response and sometimes inspires further research in order to respond. Sometimes the inquiries in the email of peers include ideas the children hadn't initially thought about and can't be answered without doing more research on the curricular topic. Often, initiated online collaborative projects take the participating classrooms of children and their teachers beyond the learning goals initially imagined!

Seventh, the online collaboration among local to global peers in the process of doing a meaningful curricular project often leads to taking positive action with what they are learning. In the WRITE to Care projects, children learn to apply what they learn to make positive differences in the world. Being able to apply learning gained through reading,writing, and communicating on curricular topics, enables children to "go beyond information given... to use what they know in new ways and situations to build understanding.

Eighth, when primary children participate in curricular projects that include the WRITE to Care Framework, they learn that the literacy skills they are learning and using in school make a positive difference in their world.

The WRITE to Care Framework is a continually evolving journey in which the purpose is to unencumber the challenges children encounter in developing their literacy by engaging them in meaningful uses of reading, writing, and communicating that enable them to make positive contributions to their world in the present and the future. The goal of the WRITE to Care Framework is best articulated in the words of Steve E. Miller, author of Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power, and the Information Highway (Addison-Wesley Publishing. 1996)
" It takes a special kind of connection to foster healthy human development, the kind that brings support, care, stability, encouragement, variety and challenge...We need an environment that provides models of mutual respect and assistance so we can learn empathy for others and the interdependence of our collective well-being... Telecommunications can bring us together... it can help create communities... united by common concerns... Telecommunications can allow people of all ages to continue learning and growing and expanding their horizons..which is lifelong learning at its best."

A complete version of the article above, can be found through links on
http://www.psd267.wednet.edu/~kfranz/.

* The WRITE to Care Framework curriculum uses the Harvard University Graduate School of EducationTeaching for Understanding Framework which has four main components to curriculum design: Generative Topics, Understanding Goals, Performances of Understanding, Assessments. See
http://learnweb.harvard.edu/ent/home/

A Classroom Journal...

Each time we make a field trip to Sunnyside Ponds, we write about our observations of what is happening there and what changes we have noticed. As a whole class or in small groups, we write sentences for the pictures in our photo journals. Sometimes each person in the class is assigned a photo to write about for the journal. Then we put everybody's writing together to make the photo journal. Once a week we do writing in the computer lab. When we are writing about the ponds in the computer lab, we put a digital image slide show of our field trip on the big lab monitors so that, when we are writing, we can look up at the pictures of "life at the ponds" and remember what we saw.

PHOTO

Sometimes we work in pairs on our writing. We talk together about what we want to say. Then, while one person does the keyboarding, the other person is the editor who checks the words on the screen. We take turns being keyboarder and editor.

PHOTO

Sometimes, we work on our own. We each have our own computer disk so we can work on our writing in the computer lab and on our classroom computers. Each child does pond writing using our "Bird Print Writing Process". Each child's writing goes into his or her own individual writing portfolios.

PHOTO

We listen to each other's writing to learn what each other was thinking about the ponds. We help each other edit our writing and help each other practice our reading. We conference with our teacher or parent volunteers to revise and edit our writing. We put our finished writing into our writing portfolio binder notebooks. We send our writing as email and we make booklet of our email messages to use for classroom reading lessons. At our parent conference time, we each read our water habitat writing and email messages to our parents.

Reading Assessment Scores for iEARN Comfort Quilt Social Studies Project
Email Report on the Project to the Principal of Sunnyside Elementary School, Washington State

End-of-year scores by children reading email messages about our comfort quilt project are typical of the kinds of reading success children are achieving in the context of doing their iEARN Comfort Quilt Project work.

The first end-of-the-year comfort quilt project reading assessment example demonstrates students’ success when reading an email message that they composed as a whole class as a Comfort Quilt Project report to the school principal. The children composed the email message during a forty-five minute whole-class writing lesson. They re-read the message in small groups and then I assessed each child individually to determine his/her independent email reading ability .

The school reading teacher estimated that the reading level of this email text was comparable to the text of Level 30 to 33 books used in our district adopted reading assessments. Level 30 to 33 is considered a third grade reading level in our district. First grade students in our district are considered at grade level in reading by the end of the school year if they can read a Level 18 text. Second graders are at grade level at the end of the year if they can read Level 28. I did reading assessments for accuracy and rate on twenty-five first and second graders in my multiage primary classroom. Thirteen of those students were in the Title I Reading Program and three of those students were in the Special Services Program.
Each child’s reading of the email message was scored for percentile of accuracy and words per minute rate. Their accuracy and rate scores were translated into the district student numerical scores for measuring student progress in reference to standards for reading. The district elementary school descriptors for the numerical scores of student progress and the score criteria for accuracy and rate are as follows:

Reading Scores for Comfort Quilt Project Email Reply from the Principal

The second assessment example demonstrates students’ reading success when reading the principal’s email reply to their comfort quilt project report. For this assessment, the children did not see this email message or hear it read until they were asked to read it aloud on their own in a one-on-one reading assessment with the teacher. This follows the protocol of our district adopted grade level reading assessments in which children are asked to read a text they have not read before nor had read to them. Another protocol in our district reading assessment is to give the child a brief prompt before reading aloud to introduce the topic of the text being used for the assessment. Similarly, I gave a brief introductory prompt. I placed the reading email text in front of each child at the beginning of his/her assessment saying that this was a reply email message from Mrs. Watters about the comfort quilt report the class sent her.

June 6 Comfort Quilt Email Reply From Principal Level 36-38

The school reading teacher estimated that the reading level of this email text was comparable to the text of Level 36-38 books used in our district adopted reading assessments. Level 36-38 is considered a high third grade reading level in our district. I did reading assessments for accuracy and rate on the twenty-one first and second graders in my multiage primary classroom. Four students had left school before the ending of the school year. (One student reading rate was missing due to teacher error in forgetting to stop the stopwatch after the student finished reading. )

These scores demonstrate that within the context of the comfort quilt project communication documents, students' reading progress exceeded the expectations for what first and second graders could do. The scores are even more significant indicators of reading success given the fact that this class included 13 students who received federally-funded Title 1 Reading Instruction support and 3 of those 13 students also qualified for Special Services support. The class also included students who received extensive counseling support.