I ask Carl about the hardest project he has had– and he starts laughing, with great energy as he begins telling me about his Grapes of Wrath junior year project. They had to turn the Grapes of Wrath into an e-book book for LEP high school students in Half-Moon Bay, migrant family children– providing a two page summary spread for each of the 31 chapters; containing 50 vocabulary words and 50 historical facts; and providing an illustration for every chapter, and talking about a symbol or concept in every chapter. This makes it a total of 62 pages, for a group of three. A “grueling project,” he says. They then sent the e-books to another school where a teacher’s friend works with LEP students. Carl tells me he wrote his on adobe in-design, but others used powerpoint or flash. I admire greatly the way in which an English project has a real-world actual application, the collaboration required, and the technology integration. When I asked the teacher about the genesis of this excellent project, she says it began when she was telling her friend, the Half Moon Bay teacher, about teaching her students the famous Steinbeck novel about migrant farm workers. Her friend responded that she greatly wished she could teach the novel to her students, from migrant farm working families themselves, but there was no way their English was good enough.
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