When I heard about Immigrant's Day at the State House, I was immediately interested in having my ESL 5 class participate in the planned activities. When I first proposed that we substitute a State House field trip for our usual 3-hour class, my students seemed ambivalent. Some suggested that it would be an interesting experience, but the majority offered no opinion. We took a class vote by a show of hands and 8 of the 13 students present that day were in favor of the trip.

Ten days before the Immigrants' Day events, it seemed like my class was the only one from our school, the Community Learning Center (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), that was planning to attend. I learned this at an ESL department meeting. At that point I offered to have my students invite other students (who regularly attend ESL class on Monday mornings) to join our group. When I asked for volunteers from my class to extend these invitations, no one stepped forward. I asked a few of my more outspoken students to reconsider and three of them relented. In this way, two other ESL classes were persuaded to join our class trip.

In preparation for our visit to state representatives my students had an open discussion about what topics to bring up in a letter I planned to write for presentation to lawmakers. "What can your government do for you? Are there some changes you would like your representative's support for?" Students were fairly outspoken and used examples as they brought up issues they felt strongly about: the status of Haitian immigrants as refugees, the hastiness of Department of Social Service representatives to separate children from their families in cases of alleged neglect or abuse, the need for more bilingual staff in public schools... I drafted the letter incorporating these issues and the students reviewed and supported it. We were ready for Immigrants' Day.

On the morning of the planned event, March 30, Tom Macdonald approached me as I was flurrying around with last minute preparations. He proposed that my class put together a web page documenting this Immigrants' Day trip. I felt a bit harried and my heart sank a little as I imagined a lot of unanticipated work on my plate. Still, I told Tom to make his pitch to the students and that they should decide for themselves. Minutes later it was decided- Tom would come along with us to the State House and document the trip with his digital camera. I didn't suspect that during the State House welcoming assembly, Tom would pass the camera off to me and suggest that I continue taking photos of the meeting with legislators. I was roped in!

That afternoon, I returned the camera to Tom and he promised to begin shaping the website. The very next morning, Tom gave me a website address and I was astounded and thrilled to see our class photos on the Web. Such immediate gratification for so little effort on our part!! I made copies for my students and, at Tom's suggestion (though I was now a willing participant and Believer) asked them to write captions for the photos and descriptions of how we pulled together what was now a larger project than the intended field trip we'd first planned for. All were willing to contribute and were excited about the website. The website was such a wonderful validation of the students' participation. The students wrote, I helped edit, and several of us typed our passages onto one class floppy disk. Now, a month after the event, we are looking forward to having Tom help us finish up the site. First for the Community Learning Center, now for the rest of the net-surfing world! For all who visit this site, enjoy it- we are all proud to have contributed to it. This was an extremely satisfying project for all in my class.

Comments from students about using the computer in the project.