September 2004 — Features
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Cybermentoring: An Online Literacy Project in Teacher Education
The students learned a lot from each other during the semantic map discussion because it teaches sharing, knowledge, understanding, cooperation and respect for other’s ideas. It also enabled the students to visualize relationships and categorize words accordingly. Teaching vocabulary through semantic mapping combines a student’s understanding of the word as well as a student’s ability to perceive similarities and differences in words.After generating an idea for writing, the students would now go through the five-part writing process of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and publishing. The students then posted their stories so that they were available to the cybermentors. The teacher candidates read their stories and sent responses back to the students. They were careful to give students lots of positive reinforcement for their efforts. The cybermentors focused on spelling, capitalization, punctuation and the content of the stories that students were writing.
Actively Engaging Students
Molly, one of the elementary students, worked hard to craft her first draft, which she entered into the project database. This database, created with FileMaker Pro software, was housed on the university server and was created so that the project could instantly reflect the children’s writing.
Molly’s cybermentor, Julie, played an important role by interacting with the young girl throughout the writing process. In responding to Molly’s first draft, Julie began by making a social acknowledgement (“Hi Molly, my name is Julie and I am your writing buddy”), then proceeded with feedback. The comments were friendly, positive and focused on the story’s strengths. Julie did not make suggestions for grammatical changes, but instead asked questions to encourage Molly to try new approaches. As students arrived at school the next morning, they anxiously awaited their turn to read their responses.
Molly revised her story, made corrections and posted the second version in the database. When Julie arrived in her methods class that afternoon, she gained access to the database and began to look at Molly’s revised work. Julie’s eyes immediately opened wide, her hands went up in the air as she turned to a classmate with excitement and said, “Oh look, she changed it; she really did a great job!” She continued rereading the story and provided Molly with positive feedback on the changes made.
The teacher candidates continued reading rain forest stories the students had written and sending responses. However, reading stories oftentimes could be challenging when the elementary students chose to use inventive spelling in their story writing. One teacher candidate wrote to the classroom teacher and asked if she could help him decipher the typed story before responding to the student. After interpreting the text, the teacher candidate responded to the student’s writing with a social acknowledgement, praise, questioning and suggestions.
Once the students’ assignments were completed, they were assessed using a holistic scoring rubric (see Table 1 on Page 34). The teacher commented on how amazing it was to see most of her students accomplish the task after only their second version. She saw her students becoming actively engaged in learning, especially those who had not been before.
