Your neighbor, Alicia, who has been one of your mentors and friends for as long as you can remember, has joined the Peace Corps. After three months of training, she has been assigned to the town of Mina el Limón in Nicaragua. The town has a population of approximately two to three thousand people. Among other things, such as fostering a network of relationships, she will be responsible for teaching science in the local elementary school. Mina el Limón has limited electricity, and there is no television. The town does not have running water. Water is delivered by truck and stored on cisterns on the roofs of the houses.

The nearest town, León, is three hours away by bus. Alicia goes to León on weekends where she has a post office box and where she is also able to access her e-mail.
You are interested in practicing your Spanish, and she is delighted to read anything that you write to her. You have been saving your work in a special portfolio that she can access when she goes to León each week. You will add work to this portfolio at various intervals during the year. Hopefully, you will receive a note from Alicia from time to time, but if not, you can always catch up with her when she comes home to visit.

You will create an electronic portfolio of your writing pieces. Throughout the year you are assigned to write on a variety of topics. You will make an electronic portfoilio of these writings to share with Alicia. You will design a cover for your portfolio, and you will periodically add new pages to your portfolio that will include your written pieces and appropriate graphics. Periodically you should e-mail Alicia notifying her that new pages are there for her enjoyment.

  1. Periodically you will word process compositions about various assigned topics.
  2. As a homework assignment you will e-mail the documents to your account at school, and then you will copy and paste them into their portfolios for posting to the web. You will also make a cover for your portfolio using the Fireworks application.
  3. After logging into the GA Filer area of your server account, go into Curricular Projects, then the Thoughts folder and your period. Now make a folder with your name. In here you will save your work. Make sure all documents that you emailed to yourself are saved in this folder.
  4. You will spend three class periods working in the MSCALC. You will create your cover using Macromedia Fireworks and you will create your portfolio using Adobe PageMill.
  5. After a brief introduction to Fireworks, following the step by step instructions, you will create your portfolio cover using the "Text" tool and the "drawing" tools available in Fireworks.
  6. You are to enhance your text using the stroke, fill end effects options. They can incorporate illustrations from the 525,000 graphics available from the"Art Explosion" CDs or download online graphics from free clip art sites such as http://www.artoday.com.
  7. You will remember to save your work in two formats: the PNG format, so that you can alter your work if correction is needed, and in the GIF format to be placed on their web page.
  8. Once the cover is completed you will open Page Mill, and following the step by step instructions furnished, you will place the graphic on the page, and make a link back to the student index page.
  9. No make a page using Page Mill for every piece of writing that your have. Save each page in the same server folder as you cover.
  10. You may also enhance your page with color in the background, fancy titles made in Fireworks and buttons for navigation, etc.
  11. You will be graded based on the following:

By working on this project students have honed their writing skills in the target and learned the fundamentals of web page design and construction using page Mill and Macromedia Fireworks. They will also have been able to compile an electronic portfolio in order to share their writing with a wider audience. Through their electronic portfolio format, they will have contributed to the environment by conserving paper.

This project designed and implemented by Deborah Mersky, for Germantown Academy Middle School. Page design and technical assistance furnished by Carol Siwinski, Curricular Technology Specialist.

December, 2001