"Partnership" is a commitment to work closely with a school. In this particular partnership, all of my service and research and some of my instructional time occurred in the school. This means that sometimes I had no reason to be at the school, but I went anyway just to keep connected. 

"Service Learning" is a derivative of situated cognition, a learning theory that emphasizes the importance of context (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989), in that students are expected to learn in the context where they will be working as they perform a service to that institution. Each of us provided a technical service to the school while we learned about the realities of integrating technology into teaching and learning. 

These definitions might not fit perfectly with the literature, but they represent the nature of the relationship I had with Lincoln Middle School. The best way to talk about my partnership with Lincoln is to describe what happened over the four years. 
 

"With this rotation, we were able to give each of her students the opportunity to work on a multimedia project once during the year."
 

During the first five years of being a professor, I partnered with the Army Research Institute (ARI) at Fort Gordon. I worked with them on several projects relating to intelligent tutoring systems. One of the key constructs that came out of my experience with ARI was that I devoted all of my research and development time to projects with ARI. Unfortunately, in 1994 there were a series of base closings. As part of this process, ARI closed several of its field offices, including the one at Fort Gordon. As I began to cast around for ideas about how I might employ my interest in intelligent tutoring, I was approached by one of my students, a language arts teacher named Kate, about the idea of helping her figure out an interesting way of integrating computers into her classroom. 

I began to brainstorm ideas for integrating intelligent tutoring system technology into a language arts class, but all the ideas seemed like a lot of work and not very important. Also, around this time, I went to the biennial Artificial Intelligence in Education conference where I heard Elliot Soloway excitedly (as only Elliot can do) tell about his new approach to learning called project-based learning (an old idea wearing a new technology cap). This sounded like just the kind of thing that would work in this teacher's class, but Elliot was doing science projects and Kate was a language arts teacher. One of the computer tools Elliot talked about was called MediaText. It would allow children to create multimedia documents easily (including sounds, video, animations, graphics, and text). Kate's students spent a lot of time writing. It seemed like MediaText might be an interesting way of getting her students to write and use more than just written words. 

Unfortunately, Kate had no computers. I had an old 386 I was no longer using and a 486 that I had used on an Army grant that had already been completed. However, MediaText worked only on a Mac. As I worked on this problem, one of my colleagues at the University of Georgia (UGA) named Mike Hale discovered uses of Write (a simple word processor included in Windows) which gave us the options we needed. Specifically, Write would allow us to create multimedia documents that included text, graphics, photographs, videos, and sound clips on a PC. At this point, I had the needed software. But, I still needed some way of getting the photos and video into the computers. 

I begged, borrowed, andówell I stopped short and did not stealóand was able to get two video capture cards and two video cameras from colleagues, the university, and from my own supplies. With this equipment, the students could capture stills for photos. They could capture stills of anything that they would have scanned, and this ability would compensate for not having a scanner. They could capture video and add that to their documents, though the computers only had a meager 100 megs of free space. 

The next problem was that Kate was unwilling to spend a lot of time teaching technology to her students in a language arts class. "Keep It Simple, Stupid" was our guideline. Our solution was to create a separate "cheat sheet" for each of the tasks that students would need to do. There was one each for putting a video clip, an audio clip, and a photograph into their document. Most of the students did not need instruction on how to use a word processor, and those who did learned from their fellow students. Computer instruction took one class period to show the students each of these processes using a borrowed data projection system. Between the demonstration and the cheat sheets, the students easily figured out what to do, though a graduate student (Huey-Ling Fan) would visit the class once a week to work out problems. 

We put the two computers into Kate's classroom and arranged for students to work in groups of two or three (4 to 6 students around the two computers). We rotated groups onto computer projects each 6-week grading period. When they worked on the computer, their writing grade for the marking period was based on their final multimedia project. With this rotation, we were able to give each of her students the opportunity to work on a multimedia project once during the year. 

Each marking period we collected data. In an exchange of duties, I managed to secure Huey-Ling an assistantship which allowed her to work 13 hours per week with me in the school. We worked together in figuring out what data to collect and how to collect it. In the end, Huey-Ling was able to treat each of these opportunities as a pilot for her dissertation. She implemented this pilot or trial in the fall of the following year in Kate's classroom. We also got better at the implementation each time. 
 

"This child's special education teacher told us that he had previously been totally alienated from school and his other classes. She saw this project as the vehicle that had brought his mind back into school and gotten him involved with learning, perhaps for the first time!"
 

The next step in the partnership was for me to come to a faculty meeting and talk to all the teachers about what we were doing in Kate's class. I did this by describing the process and showcasing the student projects. However, rather than telling the teachers that we had the solution and all they had to do was implement it, we simply described what we had been doing. The next step was for them to figure out what they could do in their own classes and to write a brief proposal. The best proposals would then get the computers. Fortunately, we were able to put computers into the classrooms of every teacher who wrote a proposal. Getting the computers was one of the two major achievements of the entire project from the school's perspective. 

In the second year I was able to get three graduate assistantships. One assistantship was Huey-Ling's, and she used it to work in Kate's classroom and to work with one other teacher. The other two worked throughout the school assisting teachers as they began to implement their projects. One other doctoral student signed up to work with a social studies teacher to implement the multimedia projects with a history application. She then made her findings a part of her dissertation. This is one of the most powerful aspects of my partnership with Lincoln. This particular student had been trying to find some place to do her dissertation and had only a general idea for what the dissertation was to be about. Because I was there in the school and because we had successfully secured the grant for computers, Lincoln Middle was an ideal place to conduct research on technology integration. Teachers were very willing for my graduate students to come into their classrooms because the students brought technological expertise with them. 

The remainder of the second year revolved around supporting teachers as they tried to implement the project-based ideas using the new computers. By the end of the year, teachers had a few concerns. One was that it was difficult to implement this approach using four computers in the back of the classroom. The model we used to implement the grant was to put the classroom teachers in control of the computers. So, if a team of four teachers wanted to implement computers in a classroom, we gave them four computers to share. They could move them to whichever class was currently using them and did not have to deal with the bureaucracy of a lab. Another issue is that not everyone got a computer. This situation was not "fair" even though we gave computers to every teacher who wrote a proposal. Anyway, the consequence of this action was that the technology committee and principal reconfigured the computers so that all teachers (or nearly every teacher) had a computer in their classrooms by the third year of my partnership. 

In the third year, I was able to continue working on project-based approaches because I was able to place six 486-based PCs into a vacant classroom across from Kate's classroom. This acquisition allowed us to have a mini-lab. Two interesting things happened in this lab during the third year. First, during one of my classes at UGA while I was enthusiastically describing the benefits of the project-based approach, one of the teachers from Lincoln suggested that the success I was experiencing was the result of having highly motivated students (Kate taught "advanced" language arts). He said if I tried these things with his lower achieving students, it wouldn't work. I took up the challenge. 

We set up a replication of Huey-Ling's study with a few variations. Huey-Ling found a significant improvement in writing ability from pre to posttest with Kate's advanced language arts students. However, there were a variety of alternative explanations for this improvement other than the use of multimedia projects. We ran the same experiment, but controlled for the alternative explanations along with using a control group. No significant differences resulted. We also set up Huey-Ling's approach with a special education class for students who were classified as behavior disordered (BD) and a class unofficially described as an "at-risk" language arts class. Both of these classes were quite successful. One of the BD students did a multimedia project on lions and tigers. Later in the year, he was able to add some content and then show this product in his science class where they were studying mammals. Still later in the year, he showed it again in a social studies class where they were studying India. This child's special education teacher told us that he had previously been totally alienated from school and his other classes. She saw this project as the vehicle that had brought his mind back into school and gotten him involved with learning, perhaps for the first time! 
 
 

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