by David Grant

Seven years ago, when I began teaching multimedia production at King Middle School, the notion of working with sound, digital images, and video seemed to many like a marginal add-on to Expeditionary Learning practice at the school. Parents and colleagues--and even my first students--questioned the value of doing work with these new tools and practices. At the time, in different measure, we were all ignorant of how quickly multimedia production would move from the margins to the middle of our work.

Within just a few years, our seventh-grade teachers and students produced Fading Footprints, a CD-ROM about Maine's endangered species. The CD was rich in scientifically-correct species illustrations, broad concept pages, 70 researched species pages (one per student) as well as original video and audio documenting the students' learning process.

For many of us who worked on Fading Footprints, the CD was a breakthrough expedition product. Multimedia production had moved from being a marginal addition to a core component of our expeditions. Why did things change so quickly? In large measure the changes were technological; computers and other gadgets got smarter, faster, and more immediately available. But the real impetus of change came from something much more powerful: our encounters with students in our classrooms.

When we conducted Fading Footprints it felt like there were two sets of guiding questions--one for students and another for ourselves. For students, the questions related to biology and conservation policy. For teachers, the question was pedagogical: how can technology strengthen our learning expeditions?

The answers are related to core values in Expeditionary Learning. We learn best by making things; we all learn in different ways at different speeds; we are motivated by real work; and at the heart of learning is literacy. In each of these core areas, technology created opportunities to better realize what our instincts and experiences had long told us are best for teaching and learning. It's not the computers; it's the practice.

Representing to Learn

Expeditionary Learning has always focused on the relationship between learning and making things, and for good reason. Educational research indicates that students best master curriculum that they are required to represent, whether their representations take the form of writing, performing, documenting, modeling, and so on. The research further indicates that the representational process should not be used primarily for assessment of learning, but rather as a core vehicle for acquiring knowledge and skills.

All of this is nothing new. The practice of learning through representation is tried and true. In the language arts classroom it is called writing-to-learn. More recently, the new term representing-to-learn acknowledges that a variety of techniques, tools, and media can be used to develop knowledge.

Through multimedia production technology, King students and teachers finally have the means to construct appropriately sophisticated representations of curriculum. These new technologies, combined with knowledge of Expeditionary Learning core practices, are enabling all students to create representations of learning that are rich in core content, fixed in narrative, connect discrete knowledge to broad concepts, and are fundamentally linked to multiple forms of learning and expression --in short, representations of learning that more closely reflect the complexity of intelligence.

What does it look like when we add all of these tools and techniques to the mix of a learning expedition?

The Expedition

We taught the 12-week expedition Fading Footprints in the spring of 2001 and 2003. In the science portion, students spent the first month learning the broad themes and vocabulary of ecology. In the second month, students conducted independent species research and produced a prototype product. In the final month, students were busy representing their acquired knowledge in media that would be included on the CD.

During the early phase, our knowledge of the final product guided our work as teachers. We determined that the CD-ROM would be an interactive field guide--similar to earlier paper products at the school--cataloguing Maine's endangered species. Like earlier field guides, the CD would incorporate the work of all students into one product. But unlike earlier products, we had a virtually unlimited canvas for the students: the product could (and does) incorporate beautiful color images by students, video and audio recorded and edited by students, and unlimited pages of text. We were also excited by the possibilities of having students demonstrate the relationships among broad ecological concepts and discrete species through hyperlinks. By the second month, we assigned each student a species monitored in the state. Students began scientifically accurate watercolor illustrations of their animals in art class, and they began to use the school's electronic and bound research resources to collect information about their animals.

While students conducted research, we developed a model for the CD using Microsoft Word's web authoring utility which, due to the familiarity of Word documents, we felt would pose few technical challenges to the class. We established a common folder in the school's network for collecting and organizing all students' work, created templates and criteria for fonts, hyperlinks, and images, and designed an overall schematic for the CD. Designing for All Students

One of the perennial challenges of designing learning expeditions is planning for the needs and potential of all students in our classrooms. As the expedition entered its final month, we took advantage of the product design and the power of learning through representation to both reinforce and extend the essential learning for all students. As the final month began most students required additional time to complete illustrations, research, and writing for their species pages. Their classmates who had finished early began to construct additional concept pages, explaining the broad concepts related to ecology and to the species catalogued on the CD.

As the expedition entered its last few weeks, all species pages were due. Students who had finished ahead of their peers presented their concept pages in science classes for peer editing. All 70 students reviewed each of the more than 20 concept pages produced by their peers and subsequently selected no fewer than five concept pages to link to their individual page. In the final week, a team of 12 students applied for positions on the CD-ROM team and produced a master CD.

The advantages of working in a representation and media rich learning environment really came to light during the final third of the expedition. For students who produced wonderful artwork but struggled with writing, the incorporation of visual work in their product was invigorating. Furthermore, the multitiered final product, in which all students were required to produce species pages as well as given the option to produce additional concept pages, created opportunities for all students to do their best work. Teachers gave extra assistance to students who struggled to complete species pages. Students who could do more were encouraged to do so. In fact, the only way for students to earn an A+ for the final product was by representing more knowledge by way of producing concept pages.

When one views the final product, however, all of the work looks equivalent on the surface; the extra work, though immediately accessible through hyperlinks, lies beneath the surface and does not detract from the appearance of anyone else's work.

Real Work and Literacy

The benefits of creating a comprehensive, contemporary, and useful product such as a CD-ROM are numerous. Anybody who has made something cool with students appreciates how important the product can be for generating and sustaining student motivation. Put simply, students are excited about technology. Ask them to come on a technology rich learning expedition and they will join you--and their motivation is reasonable.

Our students have been raised in a media rich environment. Whether we like it or not, multimedia is their diet of choice, and it is not going away. We have an obligation to match their conditioning and consequently empower them to make decisions about how they will, or will not, engage in the world that media projects around us all.

Media literacy is commonly misunderstood as empowering students to become intelligent consumers of media. But how we behave as consumers pales in comparison to what we can accomplish as producers. Just as we learn more about reading from writing, we become more literate about media by creating our own. Students must become the authors of their learning--in the media of their age--if they are to become powerful participants in their world. Literacy has never been about anything else.

This is not to say that all schools should be making CD-ROMS as the learning products of expeditions. In fact, in this school year we are on course to produce several hundred CDs fewer than last year. Recent improvements in high-speed Internet and multimedia compression have made the web an excellent environment for publishing our work. This aside, the products are not the purpose. The benefits come from finding the right canvas for the work at hand, developing the essential skills and knowledge of the expedition through recursive, representational learning activities, and developing a product that provides room and reason to put it all together.

Technology and Expeditionary Learning

An interesting thing often happens when I share our work with educators from different communities. Teachers from Maine, who have the same basic technology resources as King, feel that they cannot take full advantage of the technology because their schools lack coherent, collaborative, project-based teaching models like Expeditionary Learning (see resources sidebar on page 9). Inversely, teachers from Expeditionary Learning schools have told me that they cannot take full advantage of the model because their schools lack technology resources and support.

Both groups are right. But the challenges of redefining a school's learning culture far outweigh the difficulty of integrating technology into schools where best teaching practice is already well established. Expeditionary Learning schools, by design, are poised to take advantage of technology for teaching and learning.

So, should we accept and include the benefits of technology as part of our Expeditionary Learning design? The question is more complicated than it sounds because it really calls for more than one answer. Yes, we must accept and prepare for a technology-rich future in schools and beyond. But we should never become so distracted by the technology that we lose sight of our core practices and beliefs.

We learn best by making things. We all learn in different ways at different speeds. We are motivated by real work, and at the heart of learning is literacy. If, however, in the race to make digital schools, we forget what we stand for, we become like everybody else in education.

It's not the computers; it's the practice.

David Grant is the technology teaching strategist at King Middle School in Portland, Maine.

by George Brackett and Meg Campbell

In a New Yorker article about why some playgrounds in that city are highly popular with children and others in a similar location are not, Tony Hiss and Ed Koren, observe that playgrounds where the swing set, slide, and sandbox are isolated from each other do not hold nearly as much interest as playgrounds where the elements of play are physically connected to each other. They call this "all-at-once-everywhere activity," and a close observation of children buzzing around a playground designed in this manner supports their observations. [Hiss, Tony and Karen, Ed. 1993. "Child's Play." The New Yorker, May 24]

Expeditionary Learning fosters "all-at-once-everywhere" learning. At Codman Academy Charter School, our small, urban high school in Dorchester, Massachusetts, information technology helps all of us make connections. Those connections extend and crisscross and double back in nonlinear ways, just the way most of us learn. Since our campus extends to eight sites throughout the city and students travel regularly during their school week, communication is critical. Our public Internet and community intranet sites support our school culture of exploration, construction, revision, and accountability.

We offer a demanding college-preparatory program to students. Eighty percent of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, 20 percent have special education needs, and there are five primary home languages. Almost all will be the first generation to attend college. The first challenge for any high school with demographics comparable to ours is to get the students and their parents or guardians to come in on a regular basis. The second challenge is to build a culture with sufficient communication and trust that students, and their families, can legitimately take responsibility for their learning, including using state of the art technology.

Our space is designed to resemble an architect's office, with business-like rooms and lots of doors with windows and internal walls. From the door, students and families alike can see into classrooms where laptops and desktops are in frequent use, into a small computer room where students on break check e-mail or on-line resources, and into staff offices, where standard office technology shares space with the usual clutter of books and papers. Our "welcome mat" includes computers, available within steps of the front door, which are in constant use, primarily for writing, sending e-mail, or Internet browsing.

Even in such a desirable culture, without a pervasive and efficient information and communication system, adverse consequences are not only possible but also inevitable. It is still possible, for example, for a parent to think her daughter is caught up with schoolwork when it is far from the case, or for administrators to be asked repeatedly to state the school policy on uniforms. These common lapses of communication and access to information divert time and effort from the central purposes of schooling, and they prevent students and families from taking full responsibility for each student's learning. Through the use of a variety of information technologies, we have made serious attempts to address such issues.

Content Management is Key

by Effie Clairmont

My eighth graders have no fear. Even those who lack computer skills are always eager to jump into anything thrown their way, especially when it comes to computer use and the Internet. The sense of independent learning and accomplishment fostered by technology excites and drives them. What then could be better than to use the Internet as a tool to conduct expedition research?

Educators do not need computer savvy to use these tools, only imagination, a little knowledge, a webpage building program, and a publishing site. Building a WebQuest is time consuming, but well worth it in the end. A WebQuest is a teacher designed, on-line guide to web-based resources on a particular subject, which helps students accomplish a task without getting overwhelmed by the flood of information on the internet.

The WebQuest has allowed my students at Ronan Middle School in Ronan, Montana to become independent learners, taking responsibility for each section of the lesson. They can work at their own pace, up until the due date. They do not have to wait for the other students to catch up to them or feel pressured to keep up with the entire class during a particular class period. The scaffolding embedded in the technology allows students to successively work on an assignment independently, even outside of class time, allowing me to offer more individual assistance.

by Michelle Lowman and Carrie Bora

Imagine...the aroma of soul food tickling your nostrils, Sister Sledge's We are Family ringing in your ears, and excited children ready to show off their work as families file in for our third-grade "house warming" party.

"Everything you want to know about the third-grade family is on our website," explained Krystle, as she navigated the website with her mother. "We worked together as a community to pull it off."

Our school, Russell Byers Charter, moved into its new permanent home in Philadelphia this year with 200 new students and 30 new staff. To get the school community, new and old, acclimated to their new home we kicked off a schoolwide expedition, We are Home. Students designed and decorated the classroom, got to know each other, and researched the history of our school.

Toward the end of our expedition we brainstormed with the students ways to share our growth, and ultimately decided to create a home page. As Marquis noted, "This way if a parent can't make it into the school, all they have to do is visit our website from where they are." And, as parents are a school's most important resource, we were willing to do whatever it took to make sure they shared in this "home grown" experience.

Creating the Homepage

Students began by sharing their favorite websites with the class and explaining what they found exciting about them. From there the class created a list of criteria for a good website: readability, aesthetics, and content.

We surveyed parents in our weekly poll and asked them what they would like to know about our classroom home. We narrowed the topics to nine: reading, math, science, word study, teachers, behavior, classroom jobs, computers, and choice time. Students also decided to scan their self-portraits and Where I'm From poems onto the web page. After that, students formed expert groups around topics and brainstormed semantic webs and lists of activities. During a carousel walk, students read each others' work and offered feedback and suggestions. They took the feedback and began taking pictures and writing descriptive paragraphs about their topic. With writing and pictures at hand we began the process of individualizing our homepage.

Elements of Design

We brainstormed the decisions a web designer must make in creating a homepage that is pleasing to the senses and easy to read. After evaluating those characteristics in other web pages, the class was ready to design our home page. Students listed and compared the readability and beauty of font and background color combinations before selecting gray font on a simple, orange background. They recorded our school song to add an ear-tingling touch.

Giving students ownership of work has paid off. They are very careful with the classroom that they helped to create and proud to share it with family and friends. Having each group contribute a piece to the whole illustrated for our third graders the value of community. Creating the home page taught them the value of sharing their work with the community-at-large. Our children are now also much more reflective about how to use technology in the classroom.

In addition parents no longer have to worry what their children are doing during the first six weeks of school. The answer is only a click away!

Michelle Lowman and Carrie Bora teach third grade at Russell Byers Charter School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.