To help people find the online resources, we redesigned the front pages. Now most webpages are accessible within 3-4 clicks. One of my primary goals was to make our research more accessible to the public and K-12 classrooms. I am very pleased to report that I have started receiving requests from textbook writers to use the online resources. To clarify what is copyrighted and what is public domain, we broke the website into two websites: Folklife in Louisiana, http://www.louisianafolklife.org (copyrighted), and Louisiana Voices, http://www.louisianavoices.org (public domain).

With the music unit posted, we turned to adapting resources for student use. Jocelyn Donlon provided four student essays. Ironically, writing at 8th and 4th grade reading level has proved to be quite challenging and we have decided to leave that to the textbook writers. To help teachers understand how fieldwork can help them teach English Language Arts Content Standards, we are revising the Fieldwork Basics and Defining Terms units.

Eileen Engel (edengel@att.net) is now the Louisiana Voices Project Manager. Having taught every K-12 grade except 3rd before moving into professional development for educators, she draws upon her experience as Director of Education for Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA and sees significant correlations between folklore and science teacher education with both emphasizing the research process.

Folklorist Sheila Richmond (richmond.s@cox_internet.com), who formerly directed Heritage Education–Louisiana for the National Park Service's National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, is now the North Louisiana Liaison for Louisiana Voices and focuses on supporting educators in that part of the state.

In the last two years, Louisiana Voices has offered several professional development opportunities to teachers. At Louisiana Tech University, Susan Roach offered Louisiana in Folklife and Technology, the first Louisiana Voices university course. John Laudun offered Louisiana Voices Online Course, a semester course at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. We collaborated with Shana Walton at Tulane University Deep South Humanities Center on Lessons in Folklife and Technology for English Language Arts (LIFT ELA), a 2-week teacher institute with an additional 10 academic-year days. We also produced four workshops for veteran folklife-in-education practitioners.

A survey of teachers who attended 5 years of summer institutes revealed that few teachers used Louisiana Voices lessons in their classrooms. So we decided to explore other formats. The one with the most impact on teacher classroom practices has been a one-year, four-part seminar series led by Jocelyn Donlon called Folklife Studies for Louisiana Schools funded by NEH. We believe much of its success is due to teachers gathering periodically to get smaller doses and then going back to apply what they learn in their classrooms. This group of teachers has used more lessons in their classrooms than those attending an intense, one-week immersion summer experience that does not have academic year follow-up workshops.

Of course, the ideal model is the summer institute with the follow-up like Tulane’s project, but that is a $250,000 project. Without sufficient funds to continue the four-part seminar model, we focused on further supporting teachers who had already attended the more intense institutes or seminars by offering one- and two-day workshops. The first, "Not Just for Entertainment: Visiting Folk Artists in the Classroom," received unprecedented interest. More than 75 educators applied to attend, but we could accept only 25. So, we offered it again along with "Process, Product, and Publicity: Getting Projects Done" and "Practical Fieldworking: The 'How To' Workshop for Producing Student Fieldwork Experiences." Many teachers attended all three. And now, following a spate of calls from museum educators that revealed that they are using Louisiana Voices, we will offer workshops in North and South Louisiana for informal educators.