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Commissioned in 1943, the U.S.S. Intrepid served the United States Navy for thirty years. The Intrepid is best known for participating in the largest naval battle in history during World War Two. But what does this aircraft carrier have in common with an adult learning class in New York? Well, Stephanie Thomas' class at the Coney Island Learning Center at the Brooklyn Public Library used a visit to the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum to launch a project that helped them improve their reading, writing, and research skills. And it all comes together with the help of technology.
Thomas:
We were in between projects, and the group was ready to start a new project, so we do what we usually do, which was to brainstorm for... like, a half an hour, with lots of different ideas that people had, and one student came up with the Intrepid. He had driven by it many times and said, "I'd really like to visit that," and everybody else said, "That sounds great to me!" So it was an amazing consensus. Usually it's much more difficult to get a consensus about a project, but... so that is the first step, the agreement that we were going to do this as a project. And what they're doing is actually putting it into a booklet form, which is probably the hardest part of the whole piece. Using the computer as a way to sort of pull all information that we've gathered into different places and putting it into a book form so that they have it, and other people can read it if they want.
There were four students here today, and they were each doing pieces and putting the book together. James was working on... getting information off of the Internet so that we could put it into the book, the informational, or pieces, like the hours and the fees, but also the quiz, and other... there was a knowledge based... like four or five pages of... just information about the Intrepid that we're also going to put in there. So he was doing that; he was getting on the Internet, and to the Web site and printing that off. Tara was... who's our expert at scanning, 'cause we did this on one other project, and it was quite difficult, but we've mastered it, and particularly Tara's even better at it than I am. So she was doing the scanning of the pictures, which would... that we took on our trip, so that we can... so people can see what we saw on the trip, and also putting in little captions that they all wrote about, that it describes the... the pictures, so that's what Tara was doing.
Student 1:
The project that we're working on, U.S.S Intrepid, we had come together as a group, and we discussed about going on a trip. So one of the other students, which is Carroll, decided that we go on the Intrepid, so which... I never heard of the Intrepid before, so our teacher, Stephanie, said that we're going to get a lot of information on the computer. What we did when we came back from the trip is we write about what we had saw down there, and everything; we put it... in our own writing, and then we get a chance to go on the computer, type it in, and do spell check.
We had to go draw a lot, with the pictures and stuff on the computer. So my role today that I did on the computer is:
I scanned some of the pictures that we took on the Intrepid, because we was planning as a group, putting it in a book. I learned how to type; how to do spell check; how to save my work on the computer; how to make it like different colors; the writing, how to make it capital; you can go from one writing to the next, which was really good. And the scanning on the computer was a whole new process for me.
Student 2:
What I did for the project is a piece that I write. The thing that I... go on the Intrepid and see... that's what I write about. And there's a form of writing skill... you have to put down... put it down on the paper, you put... what you, in your mind, what's on the paper, what you see, before you go back and put it in the computer. And that gives me a motivation to... how to write about things that people... could take it, and read it, and enjoy what I [wrote] it, what I [wrote] about.
Student 3:
It was the first time I ever been in an aircraft carrier. I had seen one, but haven't been in one. When I went on... I was walking on a bridge or something like that. It was so big, and what I saw... so many airplanes I've never seen in my whole life:
the Japanese, the Russians, and the American airplanes... that they use in World War, in World War II, and in Vietnam.
Student 1:
These are the pictures that we took on the trip. These are just two. Actually, we took a lot of these pictures, and these are the ones that I'm scanning. We're gonna put one to the top, one to the bottom, and the back of each picture we write just a little piece as a group, what we did, what we saw, you know, so we write it out to the back. What we're gonna do is type these in the computer, put it to the bottom of each page, so that when we put together the book and someone go to read the book, they can see exactly these pictures that we took. Who was in it, what we saw, the information that we get from here. It's gonna be... here [pointing to page], so all of this is gonna scan in, as well as typed, and this is going to part of the book.
Thomas:
I have to give the library and the literacy center a lot of credit, because they had the vision really to see how important technology is in the learning process, even for people who have limited writing and reading skills, and that they're really encourage... encourage everyone to incorporate that in their learning process. And I know from the beginning the staff said, "Stephanie, you could always stay and, you know, get on the computer and see what's there." And I'd say, "Yeah, that'd be great, I'll see ya" (laughing)... and it took, you know, just some... kind of... gently, over time, encouraging, like... "Look what somebody did on the computer today," or... "Look what I found here," and also... through time, and also... some of the students who were doing work on the computers, I would go and see, and I'd say, "How'd you do that?" and they would show me, and then I started to feel a little bit less intimidated, like I didn't have to be the expert; I could just be a learner along with them.
This was something that they were all interested in doing, and they led and directed it really. I was just... along to steer a little bit here and there, but really it was their project. So I think their excitement from it was genuine; it wasn't imposed by me. There were a lot of rewards in this project, because everybody sort of did something that they hadn't really done before, almost everybody.
One person wrote, like, three pages of... to her piece, which was... you know, usually she writes a paragraph or two, sometimes a page, but she actually wrote three pages, and that was... that was an accomplishment. Another student used a different font than he ever had before, and experimented with colors, something he had never done before, so that was exciting. On this quest for information, about a particular place that they'd seen, and wanted more information about, so that, in and of itself, just going on the trip, and... and thinking about it, and writing about it... met the neat ideas they had, and their desires for this project.
What's really great about the center here is that, you know, usually there's an encouragement to put an end... the project into an end product, so that not only can students have it to take with them, but that other people can gain information not only about the Intrepid in general, but about a type of project like this, and usually there's an introduction that I do with a project that talks about how, we thought of the idea, and sort of the whole process of it, so that anybody... I think that they're available for anybody who wants to take them out and look at them.
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