District/School Administration PK-16 Program Support Educational Technology
Technology Toolkit

The Greyhound Bus® Depot
Wareham Public Schools and Virtual High School

Description of Activities

This course was taught online through the Virtual High School with students participating from various schools in Massachusetts, as well as from other states and countries. Students typically used a computer at their high school, where they had a site coordinator to help them with any technical problems.

To create their travelogues, students searched online for the information they needed. They were reminded that the sites they visited might present information that did not correspond exactly to the dates of the corresponding literary work and that they should pay careful attention to dates. Students were also encouraged to find photographs and illustrations of buildings and other landmarks found in the places they visited, again paying attention to the dates the landmarks were installed to insure they were in place at the time of the imagined visit. Students also tried to find recipes, titles of books, plays, and poems, information on composers and the music they wrote, religious beliefs of the period, and important historical events with which the "the man (or woman) on the street" would be familiar, as well as the historical personages these events surrounded.

Students tried to imagine what it would be like to walk down these streets, enter these buildings, and meet these people. They then wrote a first-person travelogue of their imagined experiences, putting what they learned about the people and places into an imagined narrative. This is a creative writing assignment and is comparable to the approach taken by a writer of historical fiction. For example, students were allowed to invent things, but nothing could contradict history as we understand it. Students wrote a first draft of the travelogue, which was then rewritten and peer reviewed.

Students finished their final drafts of the travelogues, completing them by adding photographs and illustrations. If they so desired, industrious students could assemble a video montage of their visit, complete with voice-over Descriptions and anecdotes from their "personal experiences" on the journeys. Later in the course, students were required to write a paragraph connecting the travelogue to the literary work they were studying and point out ways the journey helped them to better understand each book. Because the course was online, students turned in their final travelogues by uploading them to the Virtual High School web site. There, students viewed each other's work and were encouraged to comment, politely, on the work done by their virtual classmates.

Universal Design/Inclusion
All students were able to conduct the required web searches and to write about their findings at some level. The unit was designed as part of an online course that was geared toward honors level students, but the expectations for the final product were adjusted to the skills and abilities of the students who were participating.

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