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Wow. I cannot believe that a quarter has gone by and that I have silently been reading your messages and working on my own projects without sharing my progress. I have been involved with a few key American Memory related projects that I want to share with you. Firstly, I started off the year piloting the unit developed by Brett and Peter from Chico. (The unit that Doug and I are working on is a spring semester unit, so I thought I would dig in earlier with a unit on Native Americans.) Their unit, if you have not read it yet, deals with the Comanche Indians and the Texans around 1850. The lesson they developed uses the Life Histories as a tool to prepare students for a mock interview. As I used this lesson and the Life Histories with my students, I discovered several exciting things. To start, the Life Histories are very user friendly to 11th grade students. Students may have been overwhelmed with searching the entire collection, but Brett and Peter did a great job selecting histories for them to read. The students' ability to productively use the Internet when guided to certain places was very encouraging to me. Secondly, my students very much enjoyed the Problem Based Learning model employed in this lesson. Finally, the assessment of the project that I used, participation in a group interview and individual letters, proved quite effective. It was a nice way to see whether or not students understood what they read on-line. If you haven't looked at this lesson yet, I encourage you to; my students gained much from participating in it. Brett and Peter were also very helpful throughout the project as I ran across questions. Now, to shift gears....I was asked to be part of a presentation in our district that was aimed at convincing community members of the need for a technology levy. The presenters were asked to share how using technology in their classrooms has enhanced student learning. I chose to focus on American Memory, sharing the quick assess students have to primary source documents and in particular, visual images. The folks at the presentation were blown away by the Matthew Brady photograph collection. Another presenter, at my prodding, included some photographs from the Detroit Publishing Collection in his presentation. On the subject of visual literacy (I was somehow on that subject) I have committed to four American History units focused primary visual documents. The first unit was on the American Revolution. Students looked at a variety of images from this time period, interpreted and studied them and then, told the story of the revolution using them. The next installment will use the Matthew Brady photographs in the AM collection. Students are going to choose photographs from the collection to create a scrapbook documenting a fictional character's experience with the Civil War. I would also like them to incorporate some Walt Whitman writing in this. The third part of the "mega-unit" will be related to immigration at the turn of the century. Detroit Publishing and Panoramic Photograph collections will be used by the students here. The final installment will involve students photographing their world today, using digital cameras. Ideally, I would like them to tell the story of Mercer Island (the city where they live) using photographs and visual literacy skills. Yes, pretty ambitious...I will keep you posted on my progress. Doug and I are working on our unit on the Depression. Perhaps that fact that it will not be implemented until after January has kept us from devoting lots of time to it right now. We will post a revised lesson as soon as a postable one exists. Now, for those of you that have made it this far in my message, first, I thank you for your diligence. I have found myself truly inspired by the conversations we had this summer and a lot of my work thus far in the school year is a reflection of those conversations. I apologize for the verbosity here. I guess that is the drawback of not corresponding sooner. Sincerely, Wendy Sauer Washington State