Project Goal

The goal of the HERO project was to create an electronic learning environment using the conferencing capabilities of our First Class E Mail system.  Fourth and fifth grade students and teachers from Pattonville and Jennings electronically communicated about the universal themes contained in multicultural literature.  The students then created multimedia presentations to  "retell"  the books they had read.  The goals of the project were to (1) create students who could independently log on to an e-mail system, post to a conference and reply, (2) create students who could independently discern the main events of a book and retell them using a multimedia format, and (3) to reduce or eliminate racial, gender, and socio-cultural bias.

Other

• Various Multicultural Literature
• Tar Beach
• Smokey Night
• Pink and Say
• Telecommunications Rubric
• Attitude Survey
• Lesson Template

Teachers from Jennings and Pattonville met and choose three books that the fourth and fifth grade students would discuss on-line.  Comprehension and reflection questions were created for each of the chosen books; Tar Beach, Smokey Night, and Pink and Say.  Students read and discussed the books and then logged on to collaboratively discuss their perceptions. 

Tar Beach Questions

Smokey Night Questions

Pink and Say Questions

Students then created multimedia presentations using Powerpoint, ClarisWorks Slide Show, Kid Pix, and video tape to retell the stories or create new endings.  Teachers were given additional monies to purchase other books with multicultural themes.  Each teacher wrote 10+ lessons which were created with a database lesson template. 

First Class E Mail was the software chosen for our e mail/conferencing system.  First Class is the product of Soft Arc, Markham, Ontario, Canada. 

[HERO Mail]

This site was created by Greg Southard
Copyright 1998 Pattonville School District