Visiting Julie Johnson’s third grade classroom for the first time lead to a serious reevaluation of my project direction. I asked questions about how they collaborate in groups and gave an overview of my project and asked their opinion, many did not understand the function or how it would fit into their current classroom organization. I also questioned the most difficult part of writing for the students; many agreed that initial idea generation and then translation of that idea into a cohesive piece of writing is the most difficult.

Major take aways:

• students have trouble coming up with ideas
• translating an idea into words is difficult
• they enjoy building multi-media projects on the computer
• they like being able to express themselves and their ideas
• they love interacting with each other in person and digitally
• the whole class refers to each other as friends, not classmates or other students
• they like using the computer to create rather than organize or manage