From The YouthLearn Guide

Preface

Over the past several years, youth programs all over the country have sought new ways of incorporating computers, the Internet, and other new technologies into their work. What they have discovered is that it takes much more than good technology and good intentions to achieve results. For new technologies to live up to their full promise, it also takes a tremendous amount of careful planning, creativity, training, and support.

With this YouthLearn Guide, we hope to help you get started on the right foot in your own community. Unlike the frustrating manual that came with your computer, this one is a hands-on, easy-to-understand guide. We hope you will make it golden with heavy highlighting and keep it by your side as you go about building and refining creative and exciting learning programs.

In working to improve the lives of children in low-income communities, we at the Morino Institute have participated in several dozen initiatives to bring the benefits of technology to a wide range of youth-serving nonprofit organizations. The YouthLearn Initiative—including this guide, the comprehensive YouthLearn website (www.youthlearn.org), and the fast-growing YouthLearn online community—grew out of one of these valuable experiences. In 1998, the Morino Institute joined with four respected community organizations in Washington, DC, each with a successful after-school program and a dynamic leader committed to giving children new ways to learn, in launching the Youth Development Collaborative Pilot. This comprehensive two-year project was intended to help these partner organizations establish high-quality technology learning centers as a core component of their youth development programs.

The goal of these technology learning centers was not to teach technology as such but rather to use technology to spark project-based learning—that is, to inspire collaborative learning activities that enable students to connect their classroom work or after-school activities with real-life experiences and concerns. To offer just one recent example, one partner organization worked with a group of young people who used resources they found on the Internet to test the quality of the water flowing into their homes and in the nearby Anacostia River. After writing up their results on computer spreadsheets, the students compared what they found with government water-quality standards. Then, using the Internet and their newly stoked curiosity about the chemistry of water, they began to learn about the Clean Water Act, which was pending reauthorization in Congress. Many of the students lived within two miles of the Capitol, but this was the first time they felt connected to the work inside that ornate domed building—and the first time they realized that they could become active participants in their community.

Just as this guide documents and celebrates the power of collaboration, it also marks the beginning of a new collaborative venture for the YouthLearn Initiative. In December 2001, YouthLearn moved its institutional home from the Morino Institute to Education Development Center, Inc. EDC has a long history of work dedicated to youth development, project-based learning, and expanding access to technology. Together, EDC and the Morino Institute will help YouthLearn bring more ideas, resources, and knowledge to everyone who works with and cares about young people.

Let no one try to convince you that introducing technology into a learning program is a piece of cake. It isn't! But the step-by-step lessons, worksheets, guidelines, and other tools in this manual will show you how it can be done, and done well. If it's done well—and supported with the necessary resources—you can have a profound effect upon the lives of those you reach. You can make learning relevant rather than remote. You can help engage students who have had little success with traditional textbooks in large classrooms. You can give young people in isolated inner cities and remote rural areas the sense that they are connected to a much larger community. It's hard to integrate new technologies into learning programs, but it's worth it. We thank you for your interest in taking up the challenge.

Mario Morino and Tracy Gray
Morino Institute