Cybermentoring: An Online Literacy Project in Teacher Education

MANY AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES are located in geographically isolated areas. Arranging and coordinating practicum experiences for teacher candidates, who must juggle course requirements and travel time to the practicum sites, may therefore pose a challenge (Boxie and Mating 2001). Not only are they faced with this challenge, but also with effectively integrating technology into literacy instruction. Thus, university faculty involved with the preparation of teachers will have to provide these candidates with additional opportunities to apply computer technology (Johnson 2002). This case study looks at teacher candidates who were enrolled in a content-area literacy course and used online technologies and literacy strategies to promote meaningful learning among students at a remote elementary school some 45 miles away from the university campus. As they worked under the guidance of a classroom teacher, a professor and a doctoral candidate, they developed online writing assignments and served as writing "cybermentors" for students in a first- and second-grade classroom. They communicated with students through the use of a project database, then devised a holistic guide to judge and document the students' overall performance. The classroom teacher believed that such interactivity would enable her students to enter into a collaborative cyber project with university teacher candidates. Although she felt challenged and, at times, overwhelmed when integrating both literacy and technology, she saw the need to raise the standards of learning. She also saw the need to give students the opportunity to learn beyond the walls of the classroom and collaborate in cyberspace. Collaborating in Cyberspace The project, titled "Journeying into the Rain Forests," demonstrated the ability to address several reading and writing strategies within a single online activity. It was a new, adventurous and very exciting experience for each of the teacher candidates because they didn't have any prior hands-on experience with creating a Web site or conducting content literacy strategies online. They were very fortunate to have one group member with a vast amount of technological experience, which opened their eyes to a whole new world of technology. Not only did they learn more about the Internet, they also learned how to incorporate literacy and technology into a classroom curriculum. The teacher candidates' adventure began with a one-on-one correspondence with students online. The first- and second-grade students were studying the rain forests in their classroom, so they were asked to write a story about a rain forest animal or insect using story grammar elements (e.g., characters, plot, setting, conflict, resolution). Before the students began writing, they participated in semantic mapping to build conceptual vocabulary with their classroom teacher. "Semantic mapping is based on the premise that everything we learn must be related to something based on what we already understand" (May 1998). This was a special part of the activity because it gave the students limited knowledge about the animal or insect as a starting point from which they could gather ideas to develop their stories. 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. …