In the room's center is a tall portico-like structure with black columns, inside of which run computer cables. Small work tables around it are arranged either for individual or group work. In McGinn's Honors Imaginative Process class, for 11th and 12th graders, students examine artistic creativity through literary works, including Oedipus Rex and the stories of Henry James. But these writing projects rarely stop there. They add their best work to a class Web site and their student portfolios.
Technology also assists in class discussions.
One morning last spring, for example, students started a discussion of Oedipus Rex by watching a video of an excerpt of the play read by a student, Justin Pope. The three-minute passage, plus Pope's explanation of why it was intriguing, was recorded the day before by the digital camera trained on the theater in the round. Not only is his presentation a permanent resource for the class, it can be made available on the Web to students who were absent, or to anyone else. Drawing on interviews with family members, they wrote poems or essays to use in multimedia collages about their childhoods. She also oversees the staff of Electric Soup, a Web-based literary magazine that publishes work by many of her students, community members, and students from other countries.