Our Writing and Learning Connect Us: Betty Collum

Publication: NWP 2007 Annual Report
Date: 2007

Summary: Meet Betty Collum from Eupora Elementary, Eupora, Mississippi. She is a part of the Mississippi State University Writing/Thinking Project and Technology Liaisons Network.

Betty Collum

"Writing opens so many doors for my students," says Betty Collum, fifth grade teacher at Eupora Elementary School in rural Eupora, Mississippi. "Writing is part of everything we do and learn." Two years after her 2001 participation in the Mississippi State University Writing/Thinking Project summer institute, Betty received National Board Certification. As for her classroom teaching, "it turned 180 degrees," she claims.

Betty inspires her once-reticent writers and readers by creating a class blog. Her students share their ideas and their responses to literature with more advanced readers in other parts of the state. They also write and revise poems collaboratively online and make podcasts of their poems. The podcasts go to a writing project teacher in Massachusetts, Kevin Hodgson, who posts them on his Youth Radio blog.

The writing project has a network in every avenue of core work in literacy. If I need help, I know there will always be someone with experience to guide me.

"Technology is motivation for students," says Betty, who is the Technology Liaison for her site. She believes that teachers, too, are motivated when they see how technology can be a tool for writing and learning. Together with colleagues at her local site, she has designed a professional development program that starts teachers at one end of the spectrum— with an overhead projector—and moves them to online research and multimedia projects. Her participation in NWP's Technology Matters program gave her the resources to offer this kind of professional development, as well as the support to become a leader.

Now Betty serves on the leadership team of the NWP Technology Liaisons Network, which focuses on expanding knowledge and expertise at local sites about the connections between new technologies and literacy.

"The writing project has a network in every avenue of core work in literacy," says Betty. "If I need help, I know there will always be someone with experience to guide me."