The rationale:

Before taking the ACES course, I had already begun work on a trip to Ireland and the UK with the GT teacher at my school. Our intent was to organize an experience for Waimalu students to gain first hand knowledge of the history, art and architecture of that area. Developing a keypal project that linked our students to Irish and English students their age seemed like a natural progression. I had in mind that organizing a school visit to at least one of these partner schools would further build an understanding in our students that there are actual people on the other end of this message exchange. This would be the impetus for discussions concerning electronic etiquette regarding message content.

My original plan included a series of four lessons to introduce my sixth grade students to the idea of common geography and life styles of island communities. Differences in culture would become apparent as messages began to be exchanged. Rather than teaching these in isolation, I looked for existing activities in the 6th grade curriculum which would provide the platform for exploring these issues. I consulted and incorporated performance and content standards to assure all involved that this would be a credible set of experiences.

Organizing the page:

Once I had worked through the basic idea, I began organizing my thoughts into a visual arrangement that would encourage people to remain at my website once they stumbled onto it. I have visited too many sites that were poorly organized, graphically bland and cumbersome to navigate.

Of course ideas usually surpass present abilities and technical capabilities. The first of these being that Patti lead us through the actual HTML which was not accepted by my home Macintosh. Every time I tried to view it in other than a wordprocessing document in straight HTML, I looked at lines of rubbish. The ClarisWorks application I was using left a signature line that was unreadable by any server. I could not remove this because I was still using ClarisWorks to clean it up. Things went better once Sandi Lee loaned me a machine that had Claris Home Page installed.

Doing the write up and organization was no more difficult in Home Page that wordprocessing. I even played with links, anchors, and graphics. The first set of mistakes I made came when I tried to show other people what I had done. I had not created any files for the graphics I was using so my pages came up with gray backgrounds.

I visited several sites which offered copyright free borders and backgrounds. I used a variety of these to create distinction among my files. I bookmarked these sites because I felt they would also be useful for other projects that I would do with my sixth graders. I found several graphics to enhance the presentation of my pages. My familiarity with taking images off the Internet grew with each attempt to find more. I finally had to trim some away because, like a kid in a candy shop, there were so many that they became the focus of the pages.

Patti introduced me to two extremely useful websites. The first was a database of teachers who were interested in keypal projects. I sent out 14 queries. I asked Patti what I would do if they all wanted to partner with me. She assured me it wasn't her experience that everything pans out. Two teachers responded back favorably. Fortunately, one was in Ireland near one of the sites that was on our itinerary to visit. The second was in a smaller city outside York on the way to London.

The other site I tapped into at Patti's urging was KIDLINK/KIDLEADER. I posted my proposal for keypals and to have anyone who was part of an island community offer their thoughts on the similarities of island populations regardless of culture. This created some interesting philosophical discussions and resulted in some annoying wild goose chases at the suggestion of some well-meaning teachers who had some vague ideas of avenues to explore. I had promises from schools in Iceland and on island communities in Sweden to join the project. To date, I still am waiting for anything from their students.

Throughout the year, the KIDLINK subscription became a platform for linking other teachers with classrooms which had specific requests for projects that either included students of a differing age group or projects that I could not justify incorporating into my existing program. I paired up these requests with other teachers whom I felt would benefit from the link. I eventually heard back from a teacher in England and another in Israel who were able to conduct satisfactory projects with other classrooms.

Going on-line:

Following Patti's course, I was clueless regarding how Patti could take my files and post them on her server. She was exclusively IBM and I only had access to Macs. Her answer was to email the HTML files (created using simple text) and to ftp the graphics through a fetch program as email attachment. Like I really knew what any of this meant. I followed PattiUs instructions as best I could and found other people who had been successful in doing this.

As promised, my pages were sent and the graphics were incorporated. This was not without several frustrating attempts before finally getting things right, but the end result was the pages that I intended to see and use to attract others to the project. I ended up settling for another home page background because my original idea did not transfer properly (it kept growing in fetch).

Meeting the students:

We often have to rethink our grand schemes when faced with individuals who were not there when we thought them up. My students actually told me, "No, thank you" when I explained this project. Getting them to even sit in front of a computer was a struggle. They were simply unmotivated. Once we overcame that obstacle, I found that asking them to compose coherent messages to students halfway around the world was not as simple as I first imagined.

We took several steps backwards in developing introductory messages. When I had read through and helped the students edit all of these, we then had to wait. We started school while our partners in Ireland and England were still on summer holiday. This was not such a bad thing as it allowed us time for the Waimalu students to be issued email accounts and to work out the logistics of managing these accounts. Sandi Lee and I discussed each child having their own account, but agreed that it would be more manageable if they shared. This would make monitoring the content of messages easier and would place natural filters between the sender and recipient. The student managers could catch grammatical and spelling errors so that I was not needed to review every message out. This was truly peer mentoring.

Receiving all the messages through my own account and forwarding them to the student accounts allowed me to see what was coming and who was faithful in replying. I would check the student accounts weekly to see what activity had transpired. Most students were conscientious about sending thoughtful messages. A few required close supervision all year long.

Once the messages were returned, an initial excitement took control of the student groups to check their accounts daily for new responses. This initial excitement faded as weeks would pass with no responses. Either we or our partners had some interruption to this activity (holidays that did not exist in the other country, school events which competed for student and teacher attention, systems failures). In all, we had five good exchanges.

The trip:

Our intention was to travel with as many students as could afford this adventure. The ideal would have been for every student to meet their keypal. Few students signed up for this experience. Most claimed finances as the prohibitive factor. $2700 for a three week tour is a hardship for many families even if it was all-inclusive. Those who signed up initially dropped out as the date of departure grew nearer. When we left, there were only twelve students and their parents. All but two of these were in the GT program. There was only one sixth grade student who attended. This girl, being from another homeroom, had not participated in emailing our friends in either country. Fearing this might be the case, I partnered my fifth grade daughter with keypals in both places to guarantee that there would be at least one face-to-face encounter.

We left Hawaii the night of March 14, 1999. It took two days of travel, four separate airplanes, and two bus rides to finally reach our hotel in Galway, Ireland. We were exhausted, smelly, cranky, and seriously doubting the wisdom behind traveling so far with students ranging from 8 to 14 years old. We settled into our rooms, showered, and sat down to the first of many marvelous meals.

Our first actual day in Ireland was St. Patrick's Day. We began our study of Celtic and Norse history on the site of the Claddagh before viewing the parade. Various members of our troupe remembered to wear green that day. All eventually wished they had.

We raced across south western Ireland on a maddened pace of too much packed into too little time to reach Dublin on the agreed day to tour our keypal school. They knew up front that none of my homeroom students would be visiting, but knowing this did little to compensate for the disappointment the students felt in not meeting their friends. This day turned out to be one of the highlights of the entire trip.

We had intended to simply look over the school, shake hands with the teachers and administrators, drop off some presents from students who could not come and then be on our way. What we found was quite different. The ENTIRE school organized a "gauntlet" of greeters who formed two lines extending from the door of our bus (coach) to the front doors of the school. Our students and parents were speechless as they walked to the reception area showered with applause and cheers of "Aloha! Failte! (Irish for welcome)".

We were escorted to their computer lab where we discovered why it took so long for messages to come and and go. While they have 15 student stations in the lab (none in the individual classrooms), only one is Internet ready. All the messages are sent and received through the personal account of the technology teacher. He personally wordprocesses every student's handwritten message before sending out the entire file of all messages.

We had a brief tour of the campus and enjoyed coffee with the parents of the school. The parish priest who oversees the church and the school gave us his greetings. The school was built on land donated by the Catholic church but erected through funds from the Republic of Ireland. The government hires the teachers, but the Catholic church directs the content of the curriculum. Every child wears a uniform which they are required to purchase. They school is required to admit every student in the school's district regardless of religious preference.

Rather than any graduation exercises at the end of this primary (elementary) experience, all students go through their first communion. Photos of past graduated classes lined the hallways with entire classes dressed in formal white communion attire.

We visited several individual classrooms and were then taken outside to watch several students demonstrate traditional Irish sports. We finished our tour in the parish hall watching the school's choir perform pieces from their recent national competition (in which they took several awards for their age group for non-professional singers). The students ended with sharing a couple forms of traditional Irish dancing. They grabbed all the members of our tour for a quick lesson in the jig.

We said goodbye to the choir and were escorted back to the dining room for a luncheon prepared by the mothers of the school. The students who had participated in the keypal project were excused from class to join us for lunch.

We made our farewells as our Irish friends followed us back to our coach. Several students pressed boxes and envelopes into my hand for me to carry back to their keypals. They needed to hear again why their keypal was not able to be there that day. They asked questions about what their friends were like as the Irish students waited with me for the coach to be turned around and loaded. The rain that had threatened to fall all morning long finally began as we pulled away waving our final goodbyes.

We were unable to meet up with the school in England. Since we had to organize this tour around our spring vacation in order to minimize the time these students would miss school, it unfortunately fell at a time when British schools were released for Easter holidays. I was, however, able to meet up with the teacher who organized it all. He hopped a train to London and we met outside the British Museum for a morning of comparing Hawaiian and British schools. We had originally planned to do a walking tour, but ended up grabbing a booth in a coffee shop and talking school until it was obvious the wait help wanted us to order more or move on. We just walked over to an Indian restaurant and ordered lunch so we could talk some more. When the waiter began resetting our table for other diners, we walked back to the museum so that I could rejoin the students as they concluded their museum tour.

We all promised to stay in touch. My teacher friends weren't sure what future classes of students could do. I knew that I was being reassigned to fourth grade for the following year. We all agreed that it's best to do intensive, short term projects rather than see relationships die an electronic death through lack of continued interest or systems difficulties. My students contributed items to mail back to their friends once I returned to my classroom. They sent final messages thanking their partners for the exchange of information. It was because of this project that my girls began listening to the Irish group B*Witched and that they Irish girls began listening to N'Sync (for those of you who are clueless here: these are young musical groups that appeal to this age of students).

Putting it all together:

I took three cameras- stills, slides, digital. A word to the wise: read your owner's manual before you leave the country. The digitals were terribly grainy. This was due to how I had the camera set. I had only taken 10 disks and was determined to get every shot I could on limited disk space. Even with a graphic converter to reduce the resolution, I still came out with grainy photos. I ended up scanning the still shots to use for my web pages.

Now that I had the images and email messages saved, I wrote the final links to the web pages. I included as many graphics as I thought people would want to see. Since our friends in Ireland had not approached the idea of an AUP or parental consent for posting images on the Internet, I chose examples which did not clearly identify individuals (except for the boy who desperately wanted his keypal to know what he looked like and begged me to share his picture).

Through all of this I discovered some important guidelines for working with graphics. It begins with making sure you have a ready supply of aspirin and something to whack with a hammer. I would not advise you aim for you computer as this just compounds the frustration.

These are Patti's suggestions: GIFs for drawings and JPGs for photos. Downloading graphics directly from the Internet doesn't always allow you to choose this format, but through some tricks in graphic converters and inserting images in wordprocessing documents just to create PICT files that can become JPGs later on, most everything you really want to use can be used. The problem that usually is created by all this creativity is large files which end up taking more time than many people are willing to wait when they surf the Net.

I spent the better part of a week in the computer lab writing the pages, converting and inserting the graphics and organizing the files to ftp to Patti. This was possible because my student teacher was doing his solo at the time. We held off adding these to my existing pages until mid-May because Patti was involved with judging Think Quest projects.

It took another week between sending my files to Patti and the time they were all in order for viewing on the web. While she would deny it, Patti slaved for many hours on her end to guarantee my success at the cost of her own sanity and sleep. Of all the friendships that grew out of this project, it is the relationship that Patti and I developed on-line that I consider most valuable.

The end result:

It's finally up and viewable. The school year is over and my students have seen their friends and themselves from several computers that have Internet access. They are now convinced it is not just a parlor trick of my doing. They participated in the graphics portion and witnessed several days of my messaging with Patti. They built their own web pages as a means to convey the information they gained through a World Wars project. These pages were launched locally.