Register on our website

• A contact person from your school or organization should fill out our registration form below.
• We will send all correspondence for your group through this person, and it should be someone who can check email regularly.
• You are welcome to involve as many students and produce as many digital files as you'd like at any individual school for the same participation fee
• Each participating school or organization needs to register seperately, even if they have the same contact person.
• Each school - even in the same district - must pay a seperate participation fee.

Participation Fee

• The participation fee is a flat fee that will go towards constructing, maintaining and equipping the e-learning center at our Ugandan and Sierra Leonean sites.
  
  The participation fee for the 2011-2012 school year is:
  
  
  $150 per school
  Checks made out to "E-luminate"
  
  
  You can involve any number of students at your school for this fee. Additional schools in your district need to register and pay seperately. Thank you!
• The fee only applies to one school for one school year.
• After completing the registration form below, you will receive an invoice (a bill) via email.
• Please submit this invoice for payment within one month of registration.
• Checks can be made out to "E-luminate"
• Payment can be mailed to our office address:
  
  
  E-luminate
  2163 Gateway St N
  Middleton, WI 53562
• If your school requires the use of a purchase order, please follow the directions on the invoice.
• Once we receive and process your payment, we will send your contact person a receipt via email.

Skype with Abha, director of E-luminate

If your students (or colleagues) are interested, Abha is happy to set up a video Skype session to answer their questions about Uganda, Sierra Leone, and making digital materials. We did over a dozen such video calls last year, and they were lots of fun for everyone involved!

Contact Abha at info@e-luminate.org or 608-466-4534 to set one up (you can schedule this even before you register).

Unfortunately, Skyping with students at our sister sites is not possible due to inadequate internet connections.

Uganda and Sierra Leone

• This year E-luminate will be building its multimedia center at Kabala Library in Kabala, Sierra Leone. This library serves the entire region and many surrounding schools, which will incorporate field trips to our multimedia center as part of their schedule. The multimedia center will also provide adult educational opportunities to the community at large.
• Our materials will also be going to our multimedia center at Vienna Junior Day & Boarding School in Uganda, which is currently under construction from the last school year
• You can read more about Uganda and Sierra Leone on our Sister Sites page
• You can download and share PowerPoint presentations about E-luminate, Uganda and Sierra Leone from our Resources tab.

Writing for a Multicultural Audience

• One of the greatest challenges in writing books for children half-way across the world is putting ourselves in their shoes. How much do they know about a subject already? How will their cultural values change their understanding of a topic?
• We hope to encourage books that reflect both academic excellence and an appreciation for the child's native culture. Most of all, we want to avoid imposing our own cultural values on our readers.
• Connect the topic back to your audience:
  
  
  • Learning about your audience will help ensure that your books are as relevant and as culturally sensitive as possible.
  • Familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of a culture before writing about it or writing for its members. Learn and understand its history, values, belief systems, and the behavioral expectations of its members.
• Take care not to imply that another culture is backward, primitive, or inferior, and also avoid treating any unfamiliar practices as exotic or peculiar. In reverse, be careful not to imply that your culture is somehow superior or preferable.
• Please avoid topics having to do with wealth and privilege.
  
  
  • For example, video games, cars, shopping malls, and expensive vacations are all out of the realm of experience of these children.
• Remember that certain types of humor, especially sarcasm, do not often translate well into other cultures.
• Most importantly, the content should never contain violence.

Choose which topics you'll write about

• You can see which book topics have been requested by our sister sites in Sierra Leone and Uganda under the Requested Topics tab in the Sister Sites section of our website.. There you'll see a detailed list of the topics and descriptions to help your students choose what they'd like to write about. You can also print and download this list.
• We ask that you track how many books your students will be making in each subject area at the Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced levels.
• Once you know your topics, you can fill out our Online Topic Selection form by logging into your account after you register.
• You can always update this in the future by logging in and returning to the Topic Selection Form.
• As U.S. schools tell us which books they'll be making, we'll update the topic list on the Sister Sites page.
• This way, other U.S. schools will be able to see which topics are still in short supply.
• Please remember that we are no longer accepting student-written fiction, poetry or folklore.

Choose which software and file formats you'll use

• This year, we'd like to place a special emphasis on audio and video supplements, as we'd really like to give the students abroad more exposure to native English speakers.
• You can make books in any of the following formats:
  
  
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
  • PDF
  • Microsoft Word
  • Microsoft Publisher
  • Apple Pages
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Video: (avi, h264, mpeg, mpeg2, mpeg4, etc)
  • Image: formats (jpeg, tiff, png, bmp, etc)
  • Audio: formats (wav, mp3, etc)
• You are also welcome to scan typed, hand-made books and turn them into PDFs
• Please contact Abha at info@e-luminate.org if you have any questions about other file formats.

Make Your Materials

• The most important requirement to note is that ALL books must be type-written. Legibility is key. All of our students abroad are English Language Learners, and they struggle with reading hand-writing, even hand-writing that we would consider neat.
• When typing a book, please use clean, easy-to-read fonts instead of flowery fonts.
• SUGGESTIONS FOR ILLUSTRATING BOOKS
  
  
  • DRAW! PAINT! COLOR!
  • Cut pictures out of a magazine and make each page a collage
  • Photos from the internet - as long as the photographer is credited.
  • Collaborate with your art teacher and make the books an interdisciplinary project
  • Use a computer art program
  • Use stencils to make creative shapes
  • Use stickers
  • Use ink stamps or other scrapbooking tools
  • Use photographs taken by your students; students can even dress up like the characters and photograph themselves as if they were staging the book
• You can scan hand-made books, as long as they're typed.
• Make the books colorful and attractive. Like children everywhere, our young audience is more likely to be drawn to a book that's fun to look at.

Quality vs. Quantity: 5 excellent books vs. 100 average ones

• Please ask your students to consider the following questions as they design their books:
  
  
  • What makes a textbook interesting or fun for YOU to read?
  • What helps you learn better and remember what you've learned?
• Be sure to include at least a letter from the author(s) and photos, if possible. The letter should not only contain information about the author, but it should also be a message of hope and friendship to the reader. Please do not include any personal contact information for you or your students
• Check for factual accuracy. Also please be sure that the material is presented as objectively as possible based on credible sources and that personal opinions and beliefs are differentiated from fact.
• Edit for grammar and mechanics. Our materials are intended to be tools to help the students improve their English
• Make the materials interdisciplinary. Integrate science and poetry or use a story as a framework for math word problems. This makes books useful in a wide variety of settings and helps reinforce cross-curricular learning.
• Your materials should be objectively beautiful to look at: lots of illustrations and visual aids, and lots of color. They must be type-written for legibility.
• Incorporate educational (and fun!) activities to help engage the students in the book and reinforce learning; this also gives the teacher an added teaching tool.This could mean exercises, quizzes, coloring activities, word puzzles, math problems, reflection questions, or ideas for observation and experimentation.
• Include a glossary of English words to help introduce new vocabulary. This will help expand your readers' vocabulary and teach new concepts.

Help Out in Other Ways

If your students feel inspired to contribute in other ways, you can visit our Donate/Volunteer section, where you can read about other ways to help:

Mail Your Finished Materials To Us

You can send your completed materials to us by flash drive.

Please mail them to our office address:

E-luminate
2163 Gateway St N
Middleton, WI 53562

2011-2012 Deadlines

Your finished digital files must be postmarked by:

June 20, 2012