I chose to use my Jr. High English classes and computer classes talents in my project. We decided to use our resources in Teutopolis to benefit other schools with a Mad Lib workshop. In short, students from other schools sent us short stories. My English classes turned them into Mad Libs and my computer classes developed the Mad Libs into a working QBASIC program. Then I sent the finished product back to the participating school via email attachments.
My district has the luxury of several PC labs linked by several Novell networks. One of these labs at the high school is also linked to the internet via a high speed line. The lab that I teach in and coordinated my Mad Lib project is at the Jr. High has 24 computers. I teach word processing, database production, and programming in this room. Because our resources are so great for a school our size and I wanted to tap these resources and the talents of the students in Teutopolis with my Internet project. Because this jr. high lab does not have internet access or a phone line, I had to conduct all the online activities at the high school internet lab before and after school.
The purpose of the Mad Lib workshop was to reinforce the parts of speech lessons in English classes for grades 5-8 and to provide a meaningful project for my computer students.
I began the project by putting out a call for participation on the newsgroup schl.call.english on April 4, 1995. Within a week, I had received 14 responses for participation. Those that had MacIntosh computers were excluded because of the programming language differences. For the other six participants, I asked for their school's background and makeup. I sent more detailed information to any that requested it in the following week. By April 17, I received 4 short stories from 2 different schools.
The students paired together and for supplementary credit could participate in the Mad Lib workshop. All were interested, so I continue to distribute the stories as they come in from participating schools. The students take out several words from the story, then create a Mad Lib in QBASIC. The program begins with a title screen containing the programmers' names, the story's author and school and the participating teacher's name.
After the title screen, the user is prompted for the missing parts of speech in the story. Then the story is reconstructed with the substituted parts of speech that the user entered. My students add graphics and sound as they find necessary.
These files are saved to a disk and I take to them to the high school or home and email them to the participating school.
I feel that this has been a beneficial project for my students and for the participating schools. My students not only are reinforcing their communication and computer skills, but they have received a sense of accomplishment by creating a product that other students are using. The participating schools are getting a product for sharpening the English skills.
I consider this to be an ongoing project. As the stories come in from other schools, I would like my students to create the Mad Libs and a library of such.
Another teacher and I took HTML classes at NCSA and started a before school/after school project with 12 students in order to create the Teutopolis Home Page. Our purpose was to get students to navigate the Internet and compile a variety of resources for educational purposes. Until we configured our own web server, we put our files on the University of Illinois' education server, the Learning Resource Server.
We found that creating HTML documents had several benefits:
