From Printed Page to Multimedia: Evolution of a Second-Grade Class Newspaper
David M. Lund
Deborah A. Sanderson
Note: After reading this article, please visit the transcript of the discussion forum to view readers' comments.
The newspaper's sections include interviews with teachers and fellow students, jokes, stories about classroom projects, an article addressed to future second graders, and an advice column of sage counsel from two of the students in the class. And, most impressively, the paper is truly a multimedia event, with sounds, graphics, and even video. Watching it is so much fun and so exciting that students ask to view the first edition as well, while their parents are in the room. Everyone has a copy of the printed newspaper at home, but the children want to share the multimedia version, which is also included on CDs containing the school's HyperStudio projects for the year. Four hundred of these CDs have been sold to parents and other interested parties.
The preceding paragraphs depict the culmination of a project that began early in the fall of 1998, when a class of second graders read a story about a newspaper in their reading text. This article describes the project and how the use of a single computer was integrated into the curriculum and culture of the classroom. It shows further that use of the computer motivates students to learn and that students' attitudes toward the newspaper genre are affected by active participation in the production of an authentic and original newspaper of their own.
Theoretical Framework for the Project
Some theoretical background on three aspects of this project -- reading development, writing development, and the use of computers in classrooms -- will be useful for understanding why the project was designed as it was, and why it developed as it did. Reading and writing development have been discussed at length in many articles and books over the past decades and only brief discussion of their role in this project is required. The third of these topics, classroom use of computers, is a burgeoning field in education research. Since the computer played a significant part in this project, a more lengthy discussion of this subject is required.
Reading and writing. By second grade (approximately age 7), most students are becoming independent readers and range, in Holdaway's (1980) terms, from the late developmental to the transitional stage. They are more adept at silent reading, and comprehension of text begins to be emphasized in the classroom. For children at this level, reading is becoming a tool for finding information and a means of leisure time enjoyment. They are able to evoke more imagery and become less dependent on pictures. These transitional readers are more likely to become absorbed in a book, but most second graders do not reach the late transitional stages, in which they read with ease and confidence, as well as with speed and flexibility (Coombs, 1996).
Similarly, students in the second grade have begun to write independently, both formally and informally. According to Coombs (1996), their informal writing consists of lists, clusters, annotated drawings, charts, notes, records of events, and other similar documents; formal writing includes letters to people, reports, and stories. According to D'Arcy (1989), Calkins (1986, 1994), and Graves (1983, 1994), abilities in formal writing are best developed with a “process approach” that goes through five distinct phases: prewriting, composing or drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. Using this approach helps students more fully understand the process of producing formal written documents, such as magazines and newspapers. In the classroom discussed in this study, Deborah Sanderson, the teacher and coauthor of this article, utilizes this approach to writing almost exclusively.
One crucial point to note is that young children like to share their writing. According to Reutzel and Cooter (1996), sharing with others helps students feel that their writing has a purpose and audience beyond the teacher with his or her ever-present red pencil (p. 472). In addition, writing is an extremely powerful learning tool. “Writing requires that students really think about what they know” (Graves, Watts-Taffe, & Graves, 1999, p. 153). Writing enables students to take information and synthesize and apply it in new ways.
Research of the past 25 years describes the search for meaning as the driving force for young children's development of reading and writing (see, e.g., Goodman & Goodman, 1994; Halliday, 1975). Children use literacy as a means to make sense both of the world around them and of the language system to which they are exposed. Hence, encouraging students to read and write in ways that allow them to make sense of real language in real contexts is more likely to help them develop the skills necessary to become fluent readers and writers. Creation of a class newspaper provides such a real context, and thus makes an excellent choice as the basis for a project designed with this goal in mind.
Computers and multimedia. Computers have been used in schools for a variety of different purposes in the past two decades and are “an educational tool that can be well used or badly misused, like all other technology and teaching materials” (Leu & Kinzer, 1999, p. 626). For example, they have been used to teach, assist students in studying, help students and teachers more efficiently perform school-based tasks, and provide opportunities for learning about technology (Becker, 1991). More than a decade ago, Goldberg and Sherwood (1983) presented a classification system for computer use that was more student oriented, including the following five areas: learning with computers, learning about thinking with computers, learning from computers, managing learning with computers, and learning about computers. In this model of computer use, only managing learning with computers is teacher oriented. Leu and Kinzer maintain that all of the computer-related activities in which students and teachers engage in classrooms can be assigned to one of these classifications.
Recently, Al Rogers (1997; available online) , a noted collaborator with the George Lucas Educational Foundation, reiterated that the needs of students should be the main consideration when contemplating classroom computer use. His research indicates that students think computers are best used to communicate with other people, both in the process of finding information and in the dissemination of newly found information. Thus, the ability of computers to provide access to the Internet's ever-increasing volume of information (which, according to Grabe and Grabe, 1998, will double every 5.5 years) and their communicative capabilities makes them a tool that should not be ignored. Rogers goes on to say that the computer should be used as a tool to enhance education, not as a silver bullet to perfect the education process.
Recent research indicates that computer use is rising dramatically in classrooms, but perhaps not as fast as some might expect. A study conducted by Tenth Planet Explorations (1997; available online) surveyed 600 teachers from kindergarten to grade 6 across the United States, as well as 100 teachers in each of four major metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami). Results of the study and a similar study reported by Jerald (1998; available online) shed a great deal of light on the status of the computer in classrooms throughout the U.S. The data show that approximately 50 percent of the country's classrooms have a computer with multimedia capabilities and about 44 percent can access the Internet. In the Tenth Planet survey, 91 percent of the teachers who had computers in their classrooms, or approximately 45 percent of all U.S. teachers, used them an average of 11.1 hours per week, either for administrative or instructional purposes. Seventy-one percent of the survey respondents cited lack of hardware and lack of time as the primary reasons for not making more classroom use of computers. At the same time, 76 percent indicated that they believed the computer technology they used in the classroom enhanced student achievement; 62 percent also said they were comfortable with their knowledge and ability to use computers in the classroom, with 57 percent indicating they had had formal computer training. On the other hand, 31 percent of the teachers wanted more training on how to integrate computer technology into their classrooms, and 21 percent wanted to know more about using the Internet as a teaching tool. (Note that the Tenth Planet's data are subject to a margin of error of plus or minus 4%.) Similarly, Jerald reports that while most teachers have had some training in educational technology, only about 40 percent have had training in using the Internet, and about 47 percent of the schools surveyed indicated that at least half their teachers use the computer for instruction.
Another significant aspect of computer use in classrooms is the computer literacy of the students. According to Montag-Torardi (cited in Simonson & Thompson, 1997), “Computer literacy is an understanding of computer characteristics, capabilities, and applications, as well as an ability to implement this knowledge in a skillful, productive use of computer applications suitable to individual roles in society” (p. 118). Further, as cited in Simonson and Thompson (pp. 347-357), Montag-Torardi and Oviatt break computer literacy down into four categories, with a number of appended competencies: computer systems, computer applications, computer programming, and computer attitude. Most of the competencies are well beyond the knowledge base and ability of second graders, and only a handful of them were displayed by the students involved in the project.
Finally, though the research base is limited, there is some evidence that attests to the effectiveness of computer-based instruction. Roblyer, Edwards, and Havriluk (1997, pp. 28-29) list four reasons to use computers in classrooms, three of which are relevant to this project:
Leu (1996; available online) explained that the “cool things” inherent in computer applications, which allow students to perform complex tasks, enhance student motivation and invite greater participation in computer-based projects.
The design of this project and its integration of HyperStudio software capitalize on these beneficial aspects of classroom computer use. HyperStudio allows users to combine a number of different technologies and media, such as sound, video, and graphics, all controlled by hypertext (Blanchard & Rottenberg, 1997), where hypertext is defined as “nonlinear electronic text that provides readers with options to explore links between individual segments of text” (Reinking, 1997; available online). There is lots of “cool stuff” within Hyperstudio. Students who use this software must make decisions relating to navigation between text and other hypermedia elements, and they must determine the placement of text, graphics, sounds, etc. The combination of the newspaper genre, the multimedia capabilities of Hyperstudio, and the lack of hardware resources in this particular second-grade classroom provided a natural forum for copperative learning, learning how to use new tools, and learning about newspapers and their production.
Finally, when students are able to use the computer to view their multimedia presentation on the screen and can internalize a personal claim to authorship of the text, graphics, and sounds, the motivational and cognitive values of the exercise are enhanced simply through individual engagement in the learning process.
The Project
At the beginning of the 1997-98 school year, all teachers at the Mary B. Austin Elementary School were assigned the task of developing a student-based project that used HyperStudio software in a meaningful way in the classroom. The assignment was a requirement of a grant funded for a second year by the Scott Paper Company. In Deborah Sanderson's class, the project covered a period of eight months, beginning in October 1997 and culminating in the first week of June 1998. The overarching goal for the project in this classroom was to provide a useful context in which the computer and the software could be employed as an aide to learning about a real-life topic. The project took the form of students' creation of both a print- and multimedia-based class newspaper.
For the printed copy, students used The Student Writing Center software, formerly marketed by The Learning Company. This word-processing program includes a newspaper template and is very user friendly, thus facilitating the second-grade students' completion of this aspect of the project. For the multimedia version of the newspaper, HyperStudio was used. This software is based on the notion of a stack of linked cards, with each card representing one piece of the finished product. The cards can be linked in nonlinear fashion, which was significant for this project, as links were created between the newspaper's table of contents and the various pages of the paper. In addition, the software supports multimedia (graphics, audio, video, etc.), and these features were an important part of the student-created newspaper.
The classroom was equipped with one Power Macintosh (Apple Computer) for the students' and teacher's use. A focus of this project was to find a way of making effective use of a single computer within a classroom. This was an immediate problem, requiring an immediate solution.
According to Patton (1990), a project such as the one described here is, by its very nature, a collaborative effort. In particular, the search for solutions to problems within a specific program is a purpose most suited to action research, which allows collaborative researchers (in this case, a university researcher, a teacher researcher, and the students) to work within the bounds of some organization (in this case, the school) to solve some kind of problem (Argyris & Schon, 1989; Whyte, 1984). It is clear that those involved in the project not only have the greatest stake in the outcome but are also in the best position to observe the results of changes made in the classroom to enhance student learning. Patton further states that the feelings of participants and the process involved in project implementation are the best sources for determining the strengths of the course of action taken. Thus, the report of this project takes the form of a description of the implementation of the project interlaced with comments from the participants, gleaned from informal interviews and observations.
The People
The university researcher. As a professor of reading, frequent user of technology, and a member of the school's technology committee, I [the first author] was often called on by teachers to help with various technology and reading projects. As I visited my daughter's class to assist in reading instruction, Mrs. Sanderson and I saw an opportunity to integrate the computer into a meaningful learning experience for the children. I took on the role of “computer expert” in this project. I also participated as an instructor on the HyperStudio software for both teacher and students, offering a short tutorial on how they could use the program in writing their newspaper. In addition, I observed and compiled field notes of the processes involved in the project's implementation, beginning with the teacher inservice software training and concluding with the final publication of the students' multimedia newspaper. Over the course of the project, I also informally interviewed the teacher and the students.
Finally, due to lack of keyboarding skills among the second graders, I entered copy from their original, handwritten dummy newspaper into the Student Writing Center template, using the formats and layouts chosen by the students. Fry (1997) suggests that students who lack keyboarding skills should not be allowed to type until they have had instruction, to avoid their forming poor keyboarding habits. In addition, I knew from experience that keyboarding is a slow process for young children. I had participated in a project the preceding year with a class of fifth graders who could not type well but who nonetheless did their own keyboarding (Lund & Hildreth, 1997). The result was that the project took much longer than we had intended. We inferred that since the second-grade class had had no formal keyboarding instruction, allowing the children to do the typing would require too much time and might cause problems in their later learning of proper keyboarding techniques.
The teacher researcher. Sanderson is an advocate of very hands-on, active learning. She views herself as a facilitator of student learning rather than a dispenser of knowledge, and she teaches a variety of problem-solving techniques so that students can discover answers on their own.
She uses a balanced approach to literacy instruction with her students (Reutzel & Cooter, 1999). The mainstays of her methodology are the language experience approach to reading and writing (Leu & Kinzer, 1999; Nessel & Jones, 1981; Stauffer, 1980), the process approach to writing (Calkins, 1994; Graves, 1983), and power writing (Sparks, 1988), a systematic approach to teaching writing in which sentences in a paragraph are assigned numerical values from one to three. Her students engage in many cooperative learning activities each day, and their desks are grouped to facilitate collaborative reading and writing in any and all content subject teaching situations. A variety of student work is displayed on the walls inside and outside the classroom.
Sanderson was reasonably computer literate before the project began and quickly mastered the HyperStudio software. She therefore also took on the role of “computer expert,” and she provided opportunity and encouragement for the students to use any available time to work on the newspaper.
The students and their school. Mary B. Austin Elementary School is located in a major suburb of Mobile, Alabama, USA, a large southeastern city on the Gulf of Mexico. It has an excellent academic reputation, though, like many of the schools in the district, the building is often in need of repair. The majority of the children who actually live in the affluent area in which the school is located attend private schools, and nearly one-third of the students are transfers from other neighborhoods. Approximately half the students come to the school by bus or are driven by their parents from a predominantly African-American neighborhood.
In the 1997-98 school year, Mrs. Sanderson's second-grade class included 24 students: eight white and six African-American girls, and six white and four African-American boys. Four of the white children, three girls and one boy, were in the district's gifted program, and one was a learning-disabled student; one of the African-American boys was in speech therapy and was described as an “emotionally conflicted” special education student, and a second was repeating the grade. All but five of the students were reading at grade level or above by the end of the year; 16 of the 24 also had satisfactory marks on the end-of-year writing test.
Developing and Carrying out the Plan
The plan to develop a class newspaper was a direct result of the students' negative experience in reading Gail Gibbons' (1995) “Deadline! From News to Newspaper” in their reading text in October. Most of the children didn't like the story, finding it boring and difficult to understand. After listening to their comments, we decided to try to help these second graders understand the importance newspapers could have in their lives and to change their perception of the medium as a boring and useless form of communication. We felt that the most relevant way of doing this would be to have them create their own paper.
By early November, our plan was formulated and ready for implementation. The first step was to help the students understand exactly what a newspaper is. Newspapers were brought into the classroom and carefully examined by the children. They made lists of the things they found and examined specific articles for the basic characteristics of title, byline, and body. In December and January, we and a student teacher taught minilessons on various aspects of the newspaper, including headlines, letters to the editor, structure, newspaper subscribers, and newspaper staff.
Late in February, the students discussed what they had learned so far and, working in groups, they decided which parts of a newspaper would be most useful to their intended audience -- their parents, the student body, and the teachers at the school -- as they created their own class newspaper. Then the whole class listed the staff positions required for the production of each part of the newspaper, as well as the general positions they would need. Next, two coeditors were selected based on their computer and academic skills, and other jobs were taken on by students who volunteered for them on a first-come, first-served basis. All of the students were reminded that they would also serve as writers, artists, photographers, and so on, in addition to performing their specific responsibilities as members of the newspaper staff.
At the end of February the real work of putting the paper together began. Students started writing articles, creating artwork, and conducting interviews with important people around the school. Each piece was turned in to the student responsible for that particular part of the paper, who edited it and returned it to the original author or artist for revision. When the author or artist was satisfied, the work was forwarded to the coeditors, who went through a second editing process. When the coeditors approved the final revisions, the work was held in a file pending publication. However, if editing was still necessary, the work was returned to the original artist or author for additional revision and then went back to the newspaper's coeditors for approval. The students took the editing process very seriously and were careful about making changes and corrections. They did decide, however, to preserve the original spellings in the letters to the advice columnists for the Dear Bobby and Taryn section, which they thought appropriate because they had noticed this being done in similar columns in “real” newspapers.
At the end of March, enough material had been compiled to begin preparation of the first edition of the paper. The layout people pasted original handwritten work onto a large piece of colored paper, marked to correspond with the Student Writing Center template. When the layout staff and coeditors were satisfied with this dummy copy, the paper was ready to go to press. For the printed version, the students had designed a masthead and, in a whole-class discussion, they had decided on a two-column, 8.5" x 11" format, using a modified template from the Student Writing Center software.
Once the layout for the printed version had been finalized, I typed the text of the newspaper into the computer, and scanned pictures and drawings to place in appropriate spots, using the students' large-scale dummy as a guide. I then output the pages for final editing by the coeditors and made the changes they requested. After printing out the master pages, enough newspapers were photocopied for distribution to the students' chosen group of subscribers. In the same manner, the second edition was produced and distributed in June. (Click here to view a facsimile of this second edition.)
After the original print edition of the newspaper had been created, it was time to produce the multimedia version. HyperStudio is a multimedia- and hypertext-based product, and we decided that it would work well if each article had its own page or “card.” In addition, the multimedia newspaper would have a title page, a table of contents, a joke page, a page for Dear Bobby and Taryn, and a credits page.
Deciding on the structure and layout of the multimedia version was less time consuming than it had been for the print version, since the coeditors were given primary responsibility for this task. Together with the two coeditors, I used cut and paste functions to transfer information from the Student Writing Center version of the newspaper to the HyperStudio version. It took less than a week to create each edition of the HyperStudio version, and the bulk of the production time was spent adding “bells and whistles” (such as multimedia components, navigation tools, and additional artwork) at the direction of the various authors whose pieces appeared in the paper. (Click here to scroll through noninteractive facsimiles of the pages of the second edition of the multimedia newspaper.) The final step was to add video clips to accompany a social studies article.
If you have the latest version of the HyperStudio plug-in (available for Netscape and Navigator), you may look at an excerpt from the interactive version of the first edition of the multimedia newspaper. Be aware that the file is large and may take several minutes to download; you may also need to increase your computer's memory partition for your browser to 20,000 kb. If you don't have the most recent HyperStudio plug-in, you can download it free at http://www.hyperstudio.com/resource/hsplugin/plugin.htmldownload.
Computer and Traditional Literacy among the Students
By means of informal interviews with the students and observations as they worked on the project, we gathered information regarding their computer literacy. Almost 80 percent of the white children had computers in their homes, while an almost equal percentage (76%) of the African-American children did not. Of the 24 students in the class, a total of 16 had computers at home, and 14 used them at least to play games. These students could manipulate the mouse without difficulty -- that is, they did not require help to position the cursor on the screen. About 60 percent of the children could find the keys on their own, while the rest required some help. It should be noted that many of the articles turned in by the students were word processed, some in school and some at home, but in the case of the two students observed working on the classroom computer, completion of the articles took considerable time.
Two of the students were very familiar with the keyboard, although neither of them used proper keyboarding techniques. These two were chosen as the newspaper coeditors, and during the process of laying out the multimedia version they did a great deal of the actual work, thus making it clear that their personal experience with computers was helpful, despite their lack of keyboarding technique or speed.
It is extremely difficult to confirm or deny the influence of the computer on students' overall reading and writing processes in a classroom with only one computer. The difficulties arise from a number of areas -- lack of equipment, lack of time, and lack of training for both teacher and students. As a result of these difficulties, teachers and students are sometimes frustrated. One student in this project commented, “I never had enough turns on the computer.” However, it is certain that the students were motivated to use the computer to write and revise whenever possible, and they were excited to read the finished products.
What We All Learned
The comments made by students at the conclusion of the project indicate that, despite some frustrations, they learned a great deal from the experience of producing their class newspaper and they enjoyed the project. One of the coeditors said, “It was lots of work, but you could do it if you tried.” One of the girls said, “I learned that newspapers are important,” echoing others who indicated that they had learned about newspapers and how they are constructed and had come to appreciate them as an important medium for mass communication. Another student, commenting on the value of communication, said “I learned new jokes and more about dinosaurs.” They also learned that producing a newspaper requires work: specifically, formulating ideas for articles and layouts, and gathering stories, cartoons, photographs, and other items. As one boy put it, “It was lots of work, but not too hard -- except when I was asking questions for an interview.”
As students wrote their articles, stories, and jokes, the steps in the writing process -- prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing -- were reinforced, as was power writing. Every student we interviewed said that he or she had learned how to write better, and one said, “I learned how to write better and on the computer.” Students discovered again that sharing their written work provides a sense of accomplishment and adds relevancy to the classroom, and learned that jobs in the newspaper industry could be not only fun but satisfying. One young boy said, “This is like real jobs done by real people,” and a girl said, “We learned to work together. Everybody learned to do work they might do.” And one girl expressed the sentiments of several of the students when she said, “I felt good about seeing the paper on the computer screen and part of it was mine.”
We also learned some things about students and computers in the classroom. Students at this age are beginning to exhibit the manual dexterity and coordination needed to become more adept computer users -- but even in the second grade, some are forming poor keyboarding habits. Students appear to have definite ideas about how multimedia should look and sound. We speculate that this may be a result of exposure not only to computers but also to television, where computerized graphic and audio enhancements are increasingly evident. Most important, we learned that the computer is a tool that can enhance the learning process in the classroom by making it fun and by providing a means of sharing work with others. Students clamored for their turn when the computer was used, and they were excited when they saw their own work in print or on the screen in front of the whole class and the visitors. Perhaps the second author's words, spoken shortly after the project concluded, best sum up what we learned from the students:
My daughter summed up the feelings of all of us when she said, “We want to do it again!”
Limitations of the Project
Any project of this nature has inherent limitations and difficulties. This project was conducted in a single second-grade classroom, and although it seems reasonable to think that it could be replicated in other classrooms under similar conditions, there is no certainty that this could be done. The project was not part of the second-grade curriculum that had to be covered in the classroom that year, and so time constraints made it difficult to get the job done. However, we believe that the curricular enrichment provided by the newspaper project and the increased opportunities for meaningful computer use justified its time-consuming nature.
In addition to the time required for the project itself, there was also the matter of time to train both the students and the teacher to use the hardware and software. In the end, largely because of lack of equipment, the students made only limited use of the computer on an individual basis. With only one computer for 24 students, it was not possible for each of them to have the practice time necessary to become more involved in the actual computer work required for producing their newspaper. Finally, time pressures and lack of training and equipment make such a project a difficult proposition at best for a teacher to undertake without parents or others who can volunteer to help. In this case, we were fortunate enough to have the necessary support.
Looking to the Future
This is only one of many projects of this type that could be carried out in classrooms. Significantly, it relates the work of the classroom to the real world, providing the relevance so important to students. It shows how computer technology can enhance instruction and curricula, and highlights two of the myriad software titles available to teachers. It offers a framework for utilization of a single computer in the classroom that can be modified to fit other projects designed cooperatively by students and teachers.
In the future, as classrooms acquire more computers and other technology becomes available, and as teachers and students become more familiar with their use and how to integrate them into the curriculum in meaningful ways, projects of this nature will become more commonplace and easier to implement.
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Posted November 1999
© 1999-2000 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232