County:  Contra Costa
District:  Mount Diablo Unified
School :  Valley View Middle School

Giving students enough access to technology, especially when it comes to writing, can be a real challenge in our classrooms. Most of us cannot imagine writing without a word processor, and yet, our students often get very little time to use one themselves. This is not the case in Shauna Hawes’ 6th grade classroom at Valley View Middle School of Mount Diablo Unified School District. Her students use portable keyboards (Writers) for virtually every writing assignment. Last year, students used their Writers to learn Structured Writing and all of the required genres in 6th grade. The 6th grade standard required that essays be 500 words or more. Using the built-in word count on the Writers, kids were comparing numbers and almost every student wrote more than the 500 words. “Even my reluctant authors focused on ways to add details to plump up their stories,” said Mrs. Hawes

Two years ago, Mrs. Hawes wrote a Contra Costa County Technology Academy Grant to purchase a classroom set of these portable keyboards. Mrs. Hawes has only three student computers in her classroom and one hour of lab time a week, so every student has a Writer to use at all times, and she has set up a schedule so that students send that weeks’ writing assignments to their websites. With the wireless infrared sending system, her students “beam” their work to their Thinkquest websites (link to other article) where they publish their writing. Thinkquest is a FREE, protected, educational, worldwide, collaborative environment sponsored by Oracle.

Many of her students are writing on-going stories with chapters that span more than one quarter. For many students, Mrs. Hawes points out, that life-at-home can be chaotic, “Having a place and time to just allow their imaginations to fly freely is one of the ways school can support them and keep them connected. Technology allows that to happen. Students have a safe place to store their ideas and thoughts, a presence on the web that allows none of their home life to show through, and people on the web who don’t judge them for their parents, their absences or their clothes. They are judged solely by the words they share.”

To learn more about the use of portable keyboards, email Shauna Hawes This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it