Overview
An Open Letter to Other Schools
From Ellie Newman
(e-mail: ellie@nobles.edu)

Hello to everyone at Norfolk Academy, Shorecrest Preparatory School and Shore Country Day School (and other schools). My name is Ellie Newman (e-mail: ellie@nobles.edu) and I am writing to you on behalf of Noble & Greenough School where I am a teaching fellow in the Computer Department. One of the classes that I am involved in is CP1, or Computer Proficiency 1, a trimester course which all seventh graders take at some point during the school year. We are looking to see if we can create a few connections between Nobles and Norfolk based on this project on famous women.

During the last month, we have begun a web project which integrates their web skills and research about the history of women. This project was sparked by my own personal interest in women's studies which began in college. I just graduated from Trinity College, Hartford, CT, in May '98 where I majored in Women's Studies. I began there as a Studio Arts major and Women's Studies minor but became so engaged by my Women's Studies work that I eventually made it my major. It is very exciting to be combining my interests in Women's Studies and Computer Proficiency here at Nobles. I would love to connect with a few people at Norfolk Academy and see if we can make this project truly inter-scholastic via e-mail, the web and video-conferencing!

Here at Nobles, I am teaching all 50 seventh graders in CP1, integrating women's history into the computer department. We have asked each CP1 student to choose a "famous" or notable woman who they would like to research and create a web page about. Below is a sketch of what has been happening here over the course of the last month, followed by some suggestions as to how you can get your own students involved. We will have two more groups of seventh graders working on this project over the course of the year and would love to make this a collaborative project with your school. Our current group of 17 students finish up in December and we then start with 17 more in January.

Here are some suggestions and possiblities for ANY school that would like to get involved:
  1. Students at YOUR school could be assigned to evaluate these posted web pages, finding bugs and making suggestions, giving your students credit of course.
  2. Students at YOUR school could be assigned to find more info about these famous women, citing their sources of course. Via e-mail that info could be sent to us and we would then post onto our web pages, giving your students credit of course.
  3. Students at YOUR school could be assigned to draw pictures to accompany the web pages of these famous women. These pictures could be done in art class using traditional tools or electronically via a graphics program. By sending us the graphic files or the actual paper, we could then include these drawings and graphics onto our web pages.
  4. We are planning to conduct an e-mail survey of these famous women in our own electronic community which includes faculty, students, parents, trustees and the Boston Home (a residency in Dorchester Mass for multiple sclerosis residents or those with long-term physical disablities ... we will then compile these quotes into our web pages ... students at YOUR school could be asked to do the same
  5. We are planning to produce an electronic game in Hypercard using facts about these famous women. This game will run on Hypercard Player on any Mac even if you do not own Hypercard 2.2 or 2.3. We could easily send you the game and have an inter-scholastic competition between your students and our students.
  6. If your school has video-conferencing (e.g. Norfolk Academy), we could schedule 1 or more classes when students at either school could act out an imaginary scene based on the life of the famous person. These videos could easily be put onto a CD and sent to each school (we did this last year with our inventions theme).
  • By the way our CP1 class meets three times per week (Mondays 10:40-11:20, Wednesdays 11:05-11:40 and Fridays 10:40-11:20) for potential audio-conferencing (what's wrong with a speaker-phone) or video-conferencing. CP1 stands for Computer Proficiency I and is our required seventh grade computer course. We have similar courses in grades 8-10 called CP2, CP3 and CP4. Each one has an interdisciplinary curriculum theme. All seventh graders take CP1 during the Fall semester (Sept-Dec), the winter trimester (Jan-March) or Spring trimester (April-June). Accordingly, it might be possible for the winter group of CP1 to choose women inventors so that we could coordinate with Dawn Weinmann's fourth graders who are focusing on inventions!