WRITE to Care Framework:

Writing and Reading Integrating Technology into Education to Make A Difference in Our World

By Kristi Rennebohm Franz, Primary Teacher

Copyright November 1999

INTRODUCTION

Since 1993, our primary class has been using email on the International Education and Resource Network (I*EARN) and between classrooms in our own school to learn to read and write. I*EARN is a K-12 telecommunications network with a purpose of encouraging students to use telecommunications to do meaningful curricular projects that make a positive difference in the world. Click here to learn more about our curriculum that makes a difference in the world.

In 1993, we started with reading and writing just text email messages with local to global I*EARN 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 I*EARN 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. The literacy processes of reading, writing, and communication/technology using the Bird Print Writing Process

2. Curricular content in Social Studies, Science, Math, and World Languages through which children learn to write, read, and communicate while simultaneously using writing, reading, and communication to learn

3. Service Learning actions of caring that are integrated into curricular content so that children have the opportunity to make a positive difference with what they are knowing and understanding

The WRITE to Care Framework is used in I*EARN projects which has:

In the I*EARN 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 I*EARN 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 I*EARN. Two of my students gave the Opening Keynote Addresses to the 1998 I*EARN International Teachers' Conference. One student talked about the Water Habitat Project and the other student talked about our Multicultural World Languages Program.

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 and while they are also writing about caring!

In the journey of observing and reflecting with collaborating colleagues on the literacy development of children using telecommunications since 1993, several ideas consistently emerge on how and why the 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. . "A child is comprehensive and wants to understand the whole thing...the Universe." (Buckminster Fuller to Children of Earth. Complied by Cam Smith. Doubleday & Company. 1972) 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.

One first grader wrote: "Email helps me make sense of my sentences. It makes me think about what I'm going to say. I like writing to people. Email helps me learn to read and write." A second grader, when given the opportunity to communicate with I*EARN teachers about how much she liked learning to read and write using email said, "I think all the children all over the world should have what they need to read and write like we have.." Then she added, "And thanks to all the teachers around the world for helping us learn to read and write! We couldn't have done it without you!"

The WRITE to Care Framework gives opportunity for children to purposefully and meaningfully use and develop their interpersonal intelligence and literacy skills together with local to global teachers and peers in the interactive environment of the Internet. Pullman School District Superintendent, Dr. Doug Nelson says, "As our first and second graders are using the Internet to communicate with their peers worldwide...the world becomes their world. It is an ever shrinking world which is a very different world than the one in which we grew up. They see the world very differently because they have communicated very differently worldwide." (Conversation on I*EARN in Education, 1996) Howard Gardner has said, "The gift of language is universal and its development in children is strikingly constant across cultures." (Multiple Intelligences: The Theory into Practice. Howard Gardner. Harper Collins. 1993)

Second, when the children are writing about a curricular topic for which they have had meaningful real learning experiences (such as the Water Habitat Project, the Puerto Rico Comfort Quilt Project, the Nicaragua Peace Corps Partnership Project, the Global Art Project, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Ronald McDonald House Children's Hospital Project), they understood that the purpose of working on literacy skills is to be able to share those learning experiences that they know so well. "Children find value in talking with one another--to share their knowledge, experiences, and to try new things. Technology simply allows us greater means of reaching and communicating with each other. we each bring to those connections our community in all its richness and depth. Technology allows us seamless connections among our many village connections." ( It Takes Many Villages to Build A World: Honoring People and Learning: Internet Professional Development Module by Celia Einhorn, Betsy Frederick, Edwin Gragert, Barbara Meinhofer, Kristi Rennebohm Franz, & Adriana Vilela, published by World Bank World Links for Development Program, 1997)

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. In the stretched out interactive learning time frame within uses of snail mail, primary children may have easily forgotten what they wrote and to whom by the time they receive a written response. With the speed of telecommunications, the children have an "intact cognitive" hold on the context and the content of their communication efforts. The immediacy of the email communication enables children to have the context, content and purpose of their written messages intact when they receive a response. Upon reading an email response, they can still remember the full meaning of the message they sent and can connect the content of the email response to the content of the message they sent initially.

There is a synchronization and synergy between the tempo of telecommunications and the tempo with which children like to have communication happen and their need to have communication within a time frame that enables they to readily make integrated information connections! The expectation and then the reality of receiving replies highly motivates children's engagement in literacy experiences! Mem Fox has said, "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." (Radical Reflections: Passionate Opinions on Teaching, Learning, and Living by Mem Fox. Harcourt, Brace & Company. 1993)

Fourth, when the children receive a reply, it increases their motivation and understanding of how and why to work 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.

We are observing that as children are working to read reply email messages, they are using and integrating powerful semantic cues for predicting words in print along with phonemic, sight word, and syntactic cues. One child's reading behaviors started to markedly improve when we focused reading lessons on the exchange of email between our class and another class in the school that was doing the Ronald McDonald House and Children's Hospital Project with us. Instead of just looking at each words phonemically, this child started predicting words from what he expected the sentences to say about the project. It was very exciting to see how the email began to transform his approach to reading from a singular strategy of sounding out each word, to integrated strategies that included semantic and syntax cues as well!

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. When using telecommunications, children readily recognize the presence and value of reciprocity in their learning experiences. One first grader said, "I like email because you can learn about how other people talk around the world and people can learn about us when they get our email."

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 be answer without doing more research on the curricular topic. The curricular learning experiences become exponentially generative with the exchanges of email. Often, initiated online collaborative projects take the participating classrooms of children and their teachers beyond the learning goals initially imagined! "Emerging technologies have the potential to support and motivate learning, creativity, and problem solving. Inventively infused into active learning, they can open up the world for learners of all ages, in every setting." (Building Knowledge for A Nations of Learners: A Framework for Education Research. U.S. Department of Education. 1997.)

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. Examples would be the Puerto Rico Comfort Quilt Project, the Global Art Project: A Sense of Caring, the Ronald McDonald House and Children's Hospital Project and the Water Habitat Project. 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." (Performances on Understanding as defined on the Harvard University School of Education Teaching for Understanding Framework website.)

Eighth, when primary children participate in curricular projects that include WRITE to Care Framework, they learn that the literacy skills they are learning and using in school make a positive difference in their world. If we can help children achieve such an important goal as having them realize that writing and reading are ways that they can make the world a better place, we have accomplished a great goal! "Literacy is about empowering people...to write and read about their world...to use literacy to be shapers of their world with a sense of hope." (Pedagogy of Hope. Pablo Freire. Continuum. New York. 1994) If by realizing that they can make a positive difference in the world, children develop a sense of hope about their world, we have accomplished an even great goal! "One of the tasks of a progressive educator is to unveil opportunities for hope...providing hope to young people is the major challenge of teaching. Through engaging minds and imagination of children, teaching can help children develop the strength, pride, sensitivity they need to engage the world." (The Discipline of Hope: Learning from a Lifetime of teaching. Herbert Kohl. Simon and Schuster. 1998)

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."

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank my I*EARN teaching colleagues, especially: Jane McLane, Primary Teacher at Kimball Elementary in Seattle, Washington; Adriana Vilela, Secondary School Teacher in Nuequen Province, Argentina; Ed Gragert, Director I*EARN-USA; and Peter Copen, I*EARN Founder for their significant roles in developing and inspiring the WRITE to Care Framework.

I would like to thank Dr. Martha Stone Wiske, Harvard University Graduate School of Education, for her significant role in mentoring and honoring the teaching and learning that takes place within the WRITE to Care Curricular Projects.

I would like to thank Pullman School District Administrative and Teaching Colleagues along with the Parents of children in our classroom, the Board of Directors and Pullman Citizens for their support of the teaching and learning that takes place within the WRITE to Care Curricular projects.

Most importantly, my deep thanks, admiration and appreciation goes to the children who are the most important participants and contributors to the WRITE to Care Curricular Projects.

***All documents on our classroom web pages are copyrighted. The text and images are for educational use only. Please honor the integrity and original ownership of all text, design and images. We request that you not replicate the webpage designs nor publish the images and text without permission. For permission contact Kristi Rennebohm Franz at kfranz@psd267.wednet.edu

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