December 1996 — Features
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A Telecommunications-Infused Community Action Project
Mentoring these student Web publishers and videoconference producers were San Diego State University/Pacific Bell Education First Fellows (Tom March, Jodi Reed and Linda Hyman). For the many other skills students needed to learn, they mined the school community for experts. Other teachers, school secretaries and support personnel graciously contributed their help. To set up their training sessions, each student group contacted their prospective trainer, explained what learning they needed and why they needed it, scheduled the sessions, participated in the training, and made arrangements for any needed follow-up.
Student self-selection and group responsibility for training helped reduce teacher stress and work load, but more importantly, produced in the students an immediate sense of pride and ownership of the skills they acquired. As one student put it, "...it is my job to be a leader in the teleconferences and to be able to communicate effectively with the other party involved. It also has helped me to become more responsible. I know that the teleconferences are extremely important for this project so it has helped me to take the class more seriously and always do my work."
Besides the technology tasks each student was also a member of two other groups: a writing group, responsible for generating the content of one specific Web page, and a literary group engaged in reading and discussing a work of 20th Century Latin American fiction (a topic related to course content). With each group working on different tasks, class time was sometimes hectic and the tasks were diverse. Because one job built on the next, no work could be late. When an assignment was due, students who knew they'd be absent phoned in with instructions for their group or sent friends and siblings to class with the assignment in hand. Clearly, a fundamental kind of learning took place at Century High School.
Working with Others
Nonprofit Prophets attempted to foster a positive connection among people by placing students at the center of a community of caring individuals: the representatives from the nonprofit partners and a host of online mentors who tutored students via video teleconferencing in such areas as "Writing HTML," "Working with Nonprofits" and "Producing Videoconferences."
A participating teacher observed that "respect and counsel were at the heart of most of the student-adult interactions" and concluded that the students in one class "expressed a sincere attachment to Ms. Tarango (of La Raza Bookstore/Galer'a Posada) and invested a lot of time in order to produce a Web site that would not disappoint her." It is valid to remind the reader that these very human bonds were created "virtually" through videoconferencing.
