Information Technology Reference
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most of her students spoke very well but were not very comfortable writing. In
Spain the teacher decided to focus on the values dictionary and did in-depth
work with his class writing stories to express their most cherished values. The
Argentinean high school teacher who participated in the second study taught
psychology and sociology. She used Kaleidostories as a way to help her students
ground their theoretical readings in a concrete personal experience. For exam-
ple, as a final assignment, she requested her students to write a paper reporting
how the on-line community evolved over time and what kinds of narratives of
personal and social identity emerged.
In both studies children added their own personal role models to the li-
brary and very rarely used already existing ones. Sports players, popular singers
and movie stars as well as family members, friends and well-known figures such
as Mother Teresa of Calcutta were chosen as role models. Children also added
their own values and definitions to the collaborative values dictionary. Friend-
ship and love resulted, in both studies, as the most popular values with the ma-
jor number of definitions. Some definitions were simple, such as
“Friendship is
easy: two people meet and they become friends”
and others were more complex:
“They say that friendship is to be friends and that is it. But, the true friendship
is to be faithful to your friends, in the good and the bad, and never betray them.
In my opinion, true friendship is too demanding to be able to achieve it”.
While
reading the diverse definitions kids engaged in discussions about the different
meanings that a same value might have for different people.
Kaleidostories provided a framework that encouraged reading and writing
as fundamental tools for communicating with others. It helped bilingual kids
to find a meaningful activity through which to express themselves in writing
to an engaged audience of peers. Juan's story is a good example. Juan is a 17-
year-old recent immigrant who did not yet speak English and who had severe
problems writing in Spanish. He was a tough kid with discipline problems in
school. With a lot of effort and many spelling mistakes Juan became very in-
volved with Kaleidostories. It presented for him the challenge of learning to
use computers and, at the same time, allowed him to open up about aspects
of his inner life. Juan's kaleidoscope had lots of different colors and geometri-
cal shapes representing the role models and values that he shared with others.
As Juan became popular in Kaleidostories and exchanged more e-mails with
kids across the world he started to care, for the first time, about his spelling. It
was a barrier to being understood. He asked the teacher and his classmates to
correct his writing. As time went by he started writing more complex stories
and he converted into an expert user of the computer. Juan's development of
narrative and computational intelligence helped him become a more confident
