Dawn Rodrigues
I agreed to chair this committee because I have worked on technol- ogy issues in both K-12 and college/university settings. For more than 12 years, I have been using computers in my college English classes, teaching occasional graduate classes on "Computers in English and Language Arts," and doing in-service projects with the schools. Two years ago, I served as a technology coordinator for the Williamstown Public Schools (a K-6 District).

As far as stories related to our topic, I've got one that I've got to deal with right away. Teachers in the area schools have just gotten computer labs with Internet access. I'm working with the English teachers from several high schools--at this point just getting them oriented to computer use overall. Just a few weeks ago, I was trying to show a teacher how she could create guided literature response lessons by downloading a short story or novel from an E-collection such as the Gutenberg Collection. We tried and tried to find SOMETHING, but Net Nanny, the filtering software that the school district installed, would allow us very little. The only text that we succeeded in getting was the Prince and the Pauper. Other Twain (e.g.Huck Finn), Shakespeare, Poe--EVERYTHING--was unavailable to us.

I've not yet met with the language arts group who will be able to help me address this issue, but at least I've got a cause celebre in my immediate vicinity to give me some experience in this area.