A second aspect of collaboration is that complementary skills could result in something that was greater than the sum of its parts. If, for example, one partner had good language skills and the other had good visual skills, the resultant product was enhanced because of the integrated perspective. Also, as a consequence, the student with better language skills would model good language usage for the student with poorer language skills. 

Constructive Comprehension. The fifth C is constructive comprehension. It is not enough to just work in collaborative groups, but the groups need to engage in the construction of meaning. That construction can be in the form of crafting a story (for example, Big Heads) or it may be in the form of making meaning of a particular content area (for example, Prejudice in the School or The Most Popular Shoe in School. In each case, the task was open-ended. It required the students to not only find answers, but also to formulate the questions. 

In the case of stories, the children seemed to feel fairly at ease with the idea of crafting the story. However, each of them then struggled with the idea of integrating other forms of media into their documents. In many cases, the media was an after thought (now that we have the story written, how can we use media). In one case, the intent was to create a video story. Only later did they realize that video was too costly in terms of disk space and that they needed to rethink how a multimedia document might be done. In the end, they chose to include their script as the text of the document, use still images from the dramatic enactment, and record the dialogue directly into sound files (this was The Dark Boyfriend project). 

Another important part of the learning process of constructing their own multimedia products was that each child needed to struggle with copyright laws. In one instance, a group was engaged in a document about the Galapagos Islands. They were able to find much information about the islands from a multimedia CD-ROM owned by the school. From this CD-ROM they were able to find photographs to weave into their document. It was our understanding that as long as we owned a legitimate copy of the CD-ROM and we only used the data within the school for educational purposes that this was within the "Fair Use" guidelines of the copyright law. However, soon after learning how to copy the photographs and put them into their document, these children then copied text and put it into their document. It was at this point that these students needed to examine the copyright law and plagiarism more closely. 

Consequences. The final C is consequences. Perhaps the biggest consequence for participation in this project was that their final products were either going to be placed on a CD-ROM and kept in the Media Center for perpetuity and/or placed on the World Wide Web (assuming that they had not used any copyrighted material). This fact was used as a constant reminder to the children as they worked on their projects. This also aided them in keeping an "audience" in mind throughout the development process. It may be worth noting that when we started these projects three years ago, we told the students that we would not only press a CD-ROM, but we would press multiple copies and try to sell them much like the Foxfire series of books (Wigginton, 1985). Throughout the projects several students expressed their concern/interest in any profit from selling their products. Unfortunately, the projects used a great deal of copyrighted material and we never attempted to market a CD-ROM and in fact, now we have a web server that demonstrates the products without cost or profit. 
 

There are several things that we can conclude about projects implemented in middle schools using off-the-shelf software for multimedia document creation. They are: 

• Overall, students found these projects to be quite motivating. This was partially due to the fact that new technology always has that kind of impact on children. However, it was so common an outcome that we believe that it is a natural outcome of these projects. Orey, Hardy, Peng, Tzeng, Robertshaw, Hamilton, Thuma, Scott, Fan, and Crenshaw (1997) used Turner and Paris's six C's of motivation to explain this phenomena and it seems to fit quite well.
• Having a teacher or assistant that buys into the idea of project-based methods is a key to success. In one of the inner-city schools, there was no advocate and it failed.
• Children gain technological competence. These students were clearly engaged in the use of these tools and they enjoyed using them. There was no large learning curve. The use of technology can be easily integrated in to regular curriculum areas without a huge amount of time spent on teaching the technology.
• More structured activities are less motivating. The reason for this is easily explained through Turner and Paris's (1995) six C's. Without choice and control, you have really cut into the six C's. Structured activities remove both choice and control.
• Projects are effective with at-risk students and students identified as having behavioral and emotional problems. In fact, these stories suggest that the projects allowed these students to get more involved in their own learning. This increased motivation and that motivation spilled over into other academic areas.
• Because we generally used groups of students in these projects, the projects provided the opportunity for students to engage in collaboration. At times this collaboration led to conflicts, but that is almost always true in collaboration. Therefore, the students had the opportunity to learn how to be more collaborative. The risk to not being collaborative is a failed project and students did not want this to happen.
• School became so engaging and interesting that students came to school on their days off, before school started and after school. This is a problem that I wish everyone would introduce into the schools. The problem of children struggling to find extra time to get into school.

Summary and Comments

The purpose of this paper has been to describe the projects that we have conducted over the past three years at a local middle school. Besides benefiting the students in that middle school, these projects have resulted in two doctoral dissertations. In addition, the authors of the current paper include doctoral students who wanted to see children learn from technology in the school to begin to frame research ideas, to get research experience, or just to work with some students who were thoroughly engrossed in a learning experience. Similarly, several of the current authors are masters students who wanted to see technology in the schools while they were taking classes that talked about how technology might be used in the schools. They came away from the experience more knowledgeable and also inspired about how the use of technology and project-based methods can engender a high level of motivation in children. 

The partnership started between one of the current authors and a local middle school. That partnership has enriched the lives of the children in the school, the teachers in the school, the students at the university and the professor who formed this partnership. We believe that other faculty at other universities, if they were so inclined, could do the same thing. The result would be that the colleges of education around the country would be more influential on the shaping of schools and schools would be more influential in shaping colleges of education as well as the field of education. 

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