Durant Road Middle Students Use E-mail to Work with Volunteers on Their Writing
September 8, 2000 - Durant Road Middle students recently met their electronic mentors, e-mail penpals with an educational purpose. The students had the chance to sit down at a table in the school's media center and talk with the volunteers who have been offering advice via e-mail on writing, poetry, and other projects.
"Eighth-grade language arts teacher Steve Pulse and Gail Morse had this brainstorming idea of how can we get extra help for kids on a poetry unit. They came up with electronic mentoring," explained Durant Road Middle Principal Tom Benton. "What this allows the mentors to do is to work at their convenience. They can do it from home. They can do it from an office, anywhere they have a computer connected to the Internet."
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Hear
teacher Nancy Armstrong explain how electronic mentors
offer tips on writing Hear
teacher Nancy Armstrong explain how mentors focus
on strengthening each student's writing |
Morse, the school's curriculum integration coordinator, worked with teachers to begin the electronic mentoring program three years ago. They recruit mentors through the PTA and the school's Business Alliance. The volunteers receive information about the project, the student's goals, and tips on coaching the students. As the project progresses, Morse and the teachers provide mentors feedback. It's all done by e-mail, making communication convenient for the teachers, students, and mentors.
In Nancy Armstrong's sixth-grade class, students are working on their writing. For the electronic mentoring project, they write their mentor an introductory letter and then an essay.
In order to e-mail their documents, the students must learn to type and save their documents using a computer word-processing program, and to use the school system's e-mail program so they can send their documents and retrieve their mentor's responses.
"The students are totally impressed," said Armstrong. "Many times in school when you are competing with Nintendo and all the fun staff that goes on, language is difficult. It requires a lot of writing and note taking. And they love having the ability to do it on a keyboard and e-mailing someone that's real, has a high-paying job, has a lot of important information to pass on, and at the same time can relate and say, 'Oh, sure I have a dog, too. My children go here, or I really loved going to that movie that you saw.' It just encourages them and makes them want to aspire to more. That to me has been the best incentive to doing the program."
Armstrong worked with Gail Morse last year when they had 50 mentors working with more than 120 students, mainly on writing projects. The project gave the students a dose of reality.
"That is exactly what is good about it. They need different points of view. They need a real audience. They need somebody to tell them that this really is important," said Armstrong. "When they met their mentors and found they were businessmen and businesswomen, they came back very awed and feeling good about themselves, thinking this really is neat."
Morse works with the school's Business Alliance to identify
mentors. Morse and the teachers provide guidelines for the
exchanges of e-mail and require that they receive copies of
all messages between the students and mentors.
"We expect the mentors to be themselves, to really want
to have an appreciation for the child and enjoy what they
write," said Armstrong. "Understanding that the
paper is not going to be perfect, mentors can help boost the
student's morale. Make them feel that they are good writers
and that they have a lot of potential. Suggest one or two
things on the paper because much more than that becomes overwhelming."
 Electronic mentor Barbara Gustafson talks with one of the students she coaches in poetry writing. |
Barbara Gustafson drove three and-a-half hours from the Perquimans County Communities-in-Schools office in Hertford, N.C., to attend the recent meeting between students and mentors. Gustafson heard about the project from the state Communities-in-Schools office and has been assigned to work with three Durant Road Middle students on poetry with students in Steve Pulse's class.
"They are sending various types of poetry to me," said Gustafson. "I give them positive feedback about it, helping them with the rhyming, or maybe changes in the wording, or how they would like to do it that would make it more meaningful. We really don't critique the spelling or anything like that, but what we do is just kind of give them feedback. It's been fun. The students with their introductory letters told us a little about themselves. The rest has been right down to business."
At home in Hertford, Gustafson works with children in an
after-school tutoring program and in 4-H. The electronic mentoring
project has given her a chance to volunteer outside of her
community and to learn about a tool that may help students
in her schools
"It's very consumer friendly," said Gustafson. "Steve sent us an information sheet. He and Gail put it all together about what we could expect, what the criteria were for the units, and what as volunteers we would be expected to do and not to do. They gave us some suggestions about how we might respond. I thought it was put together very, very well."
For Durant Road Middle School, the electronic mentoring program
ties into a number of initiatives that Gail Morse says "helps
put the public back into public schools." The electronic
mentoring program is part of the school's improvement plan,
recruits volunteers from the school's business alliance, encourages
the use of technology, important to the school's technology
consortium, and gives students insights into their mentors's
careers, which ties into the school's career development initiative.
"Electronic mentoring is fun," said Armstrong. "Technology provides a twist that makes it much more contemporary. It takes the classroom out to the community, which is what is enjoyable about it."
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Durant Road
Middle Students Use E-mail to Work with Volunteers on
Their Writing
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