December 2004 — Features
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A University-Public School ‘Key-Pal’ Partnership
Working in a Low-Tech Environment to Create a Local Community of Learners
There is no question that today’s students must be comfortable and fluent not only in literacy and mathematical skills, but also in their understanding and use of the computer. With an increasing emphasis on accountability and high-stakes testing since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, teachers tend to concentrate on skills limited to those that appear on the tests (Gulek 2003). When technology is used for teaching literacy in the classroom within California’s rural Imperial Valley, it is often in a form that emphasizes testing and record keeping.
A challenge for teachers is to use technology not only to encourage their students to acquire discrete skills, but also in ways that are meaningful and relevant beyond the classroom. Thoughtful teachers must find time to fit technology into their crowded schedules. One way to accomplish this task is to combine topics and subjects so that they include technology applications. Literacy, when merged with computer technology, lends itself well to this mixed approach.
One example would be combining pen pals, an old technique, with the Internet to create electronic pen pals called “key pals.” There are currently only a few key-pal Web sites available, such as Teaching.com
(online at www.teaching.com) and Kids’ Space Connection (online at www.ks-connection.org), but I was interested in doing a project in the Imperial Valley to link my university students with children in local classrooms.
San Diego State University-Imperial Valley Campus (SDSU-IVC) is a small campus of 900 students in Calexico, Calif., located seven blocks from the U.S.-Mexico border. The Imperial Valley is a largely rural agricultural area, with small towns dotted throughout 4,597 square miles. Many of the preservice teachers in my classes are first-generation college students who grew up in one of these small communities, in Mexicali or in another part of Mexico. Spanish is the first language of Calexico, and it is common to hear it spoken throughout the valley.
Project Background
Teacher Education (TE) 930: The Teaching of Language Arts, the course in which this project took place, is one of two teaching of literacy courses that teacher candidates are required to take at SDSU-IVC for initial elementary certification. When I began teaching this course, I encountered students who thought that a good way to use technology combined with literacy was the Accelerated Reader program from Renaissance Learning. This was often the one way my students observed technology combined with literacy learning in their classrooms.
Accelerated Reader uses computerized tests to place students in reading levels; each level has a selection of trade books that students choose from for individual reading. After completing a book, students take a 10-question multiple-choice test to assess their comprehension. The program then provides teachers and administrators with records of what the students read and how they are progressing through the levels. It also purports to encourage an interest in reading. Another aspect of Accelerated Reader is that competition in the number of books read or levels advanced is often
