Transforming Students with Internet Freedom Writing

Transformational leaders provide learning opportunities to empower others and stimulate innovation. Their charisma inspires others to overcome resistance to change and they give individual attention to encourage and motivate others. Nahavandi (2000). "Envisioning,enabling and empowering are central to transformational leadership” (Bass, 1997, p 134). Teachers are leaders empowering their students to reach a potential they never dared to dream alone. The movie Freedom Writers with Hilary Swank portrayed a first year teacher in the middle of a newly integrated school riddled with gang violence and prejudice. She created community in her class through making the various minorities realize that prejudice hurts everyone. Students wrote in journals about their personal pain and published a book of their writings called the Freedom Writers after the civil rights Freedom Riders they studied. She raised reading and writing scores and got them interested in reading Anne Frank after taking them to a Holocaust museum. Virtual education allows e-teachers to take students on virtual field trips. There is a poetry and literature world in Active Worlds (free virtual world) for teens that stretches the imagination with renaissance costumes, an opera theater and colorful flower gardens, carousel and poems scripted on parchment billboards. Students can blog about their life and reading experiences in online journals. Relating reading to life experience is one of the traits of good readers. A good reader “makes connections, asks questions, identifies confusions agrees or disagrees with ideas” (Tovani, 2004, p.63). The anonymity of the internet encourages students to share without fear of personal reprisal. Lowering the risk level students can partake in poetry nights or Shakespeare readings in an e-conference and write in blogs sharing writings and life changing experiences from reading. E-teaching can publish student works on websites increasing student pride by sharing their work with the world. E-teachers have potent tools to stretch students’ imaginations transforming and empowering them to potentials they never knew existed. References Bass, B.M. (1960). Leadership, psychology, and organizational behavior. New York: Harper & Brothers. Nahavandi, A. (2006). The art and science of leadership (4th Ed.) [Electronic Version]. Upper Saddle River: Pearson. Tovani, C. (2004). Do I really have to Teach Reading? Portland, ME: Stenhouse.