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June 2007 > School News
UC Links Builds Foundation for Teachers,
Families in New Orleans
UC Links director Charles Underwood, left, helped train Louisiana teachers in using laptops effectively with their students.
UC Links, in collaboration with the Virtue Foundation, conducted a professional development conference on digital teaching and learning at the University of New Orleans for about 50 teachers from nine Louisiana schools districts affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita on May 18, part of an ongoing effort to support families and youth displaced by the disasters.Charles Underwood, executive director of University-Community Links (UC Links) and Scott Woodbridge, director of site development for the program at the Graduate School of Education, worked with groups, and individual teachers to improve their skills with various computer-based applications and provided training in various computer-based multimedia tools for teaching and learning, including digital storytelling.
Since last August, JuliAnna Avila, a 2007 GSE graduate and an incoming professor of education at the Georgia Southern University, has been working with the UC Links project and several of the teachers and their students in the Renaissance Village trailer camp, for New Orleans families displaced by Katrina, while Underwood, Woodbridge and their UC Berkeley students connect with the kids in various learning activities using e-mail, a blog and the UC Links website.
Underwood says that the efforts to date have set a solid foundation for continuing online and face-to-face collaboration between Louisiana teachers and their students and UC Berkeley faculty, staff and students, and that collaboration with Louisiana State Univeristy's College of Education and the University of New Orleans enables the program to sink deeper local roots.
“We're committed to continuing this work for the long haul,” says Underwood. “The rewards are considerable for all of us, both here at the University and there in the schools and trailer camps in Louisiana.”
UC Links was invited to participate in the New Orleans conference by the Virtue Foundation’s Katrina Education Initiative, a technology-focused educational pilot program, to provide advanced learning opportunities for children in storm-affected schools. Teachers attending the conference had received laptops from the Foundation, and UC Links was asked to help train the teachers in using them effectively with their students.
Started in 2005, the initiative expanded in September when the Virtue Foundation donated laptops and software licenses from Apple and Microsoft, resources worth more than $1 million, to schools in the nine school districts, spearheading the development of a technology-enabled educational model for students statewide.
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