September 17, 2003:  Check out our room...hey...no windows!  Well, that's not exactly true; there is a small rectangular window on the door (you can see it if you look closely).  But that window faces a hall, so the light of day still never enters my room.  We this shot after school.  We announced the project today to the all  students.  We told them that 126 14-year olds can change the world.  Now we have to make that happen.  Yikes. 

Our first step in the process is to have the students take photos through their windows.  The students are posting them on www.snapfish.com and we will download them from there as a start to the project.

Once we get the student photos up each is going to solicit photos from people and classrooms worldwide.  The hope is to get a movement started.  We'll see.

October 7, 2003. The class made the window frame by drawing self-portraits on 4 x 8 strips of paper.  We stapled them to the wall (quite a feat) and it looks pretty cool. 

The drawings themselves reflect the kids personalities.  Some are funny, some a bit sad, some slightly deranged, but that's how it is with 125 or so 14 year olds.  The point is they're having fun and getting into the project.  Next, the students took photos through their own windows and designed posters to reflect the good and the bad of living in San Jose.  All that and more soon.

October 19, 2003.  Posters are finished!  We took white and black poster paper, cut them on the diagonal and taped them together.  Students were asked to think about all the good stuff that goes on in the San Jose area -- outside their windows -- and then to think of some of the bad.  We listed those ideas on the board and students were given the assignment to create posters showing the good and bad side of living in this area.  Their instructions were to put the photo they took through their windows in the center and to choose one side or the other of the poster to represent the good.

The final products were all over the place.  Some were brilliant, some students barely even

tried--hey, welcome to planet earth, teacher-man.  We asked them to decide whether to hang them all or to have student choice re hanging.  Self-choice won, and about 70% said they'd participate.  But when they saw the posters on the wall, many said that they were bringing their posters back in to school.

We chose the black and white poster paper because we thought it would form some sort of cool pattern when taped to the wall.  Sure enough, it looks pretty amazing.  And since all the posters are up they're forming a massive collage, there's no real distinction between quality posters and weaker ones: They all look great. 

We're now onto the next phase: Web site.  Students are building web sites on GeoCities. Each site will be a minimum of three pages, each will link to at least five other student sites and back to this site.  Individual pages will allow students to talk about themselves, the project, and ultimately the area of social change they are adopting as their own.  Once these are up, we will begin the next wave of photo solicitations and work hard to get other schools involved.

November 22, 2003.  2007 lives.  That’s our goal: To directly improve 2007 lives this year.  Our class will graduate in 2007, so this number has significance.  And while we try, we'll get a first hand education in International Relations, social activism, politics, media, marketing, you name it.  We will be using the Internet to build communities, develop activist networks and, most importantly, to build person connections with people from around the world. 

In the meantime, photos still keep coming in.  If for some reason we missed posting one you sent, please let us know. 

Finally, we received some funding for this project from a group of great friends called Markie’s Angels (after our teacher).  We commitments or checks totaling around $700.  Another friend volunteered to donate web space on his server.  Very exciting!

January 10, 2004.  This project has been exciting, but difficult to build as much momentum as quickly as we had hoped.  We think perhaps we were overly optimistic and things take longer than they seem, particularly when it comes to recruiting involvement by other schools.  It might end up that it takes a couple years to gain the momentum we seek, particularly because we're only relying on network marketing.

February 7, 2004.  Funny, the things you think you know.  It turns out that we know a lot about some elements of leadership and product development, and really nothing about others!  We've been great at doing stuff and not so great at assigning and delegating tasks.  Our teacher has been working on training us to do so, but we lost time.  Also, we realize that it's important on a project like this to concentrate on a few important goals rather than try to move on too many fronts at once.  For example, it was probably a mistake to focus on four distinct areas rather than just having a leadership group focused on building participation.  Working to cut back and focus.

March 12, 2004.  Things are starting to pick up.  Site traffic is growing, we started a way for people to send an email about their feelings on the world to an email forum.  We're also going to add email addresses to the photo album to allow people to connect with people who post photos.  The students are setting up a template web page so people can post a page that we will link to from our site.  Students will set up their own pages as a start.  The window itself is coming together!