Joining Projects or Designing Your Own

Your school is connected to the Internet, you have access to computers for your students and you have some tips on how to use the WWW and e-mail. Now it is time to get serious and find ways to enhance learning in your classroom with the help of technology. Where do you begin? You can do one of the easiest activities - e-mail exchanges among students - but perhaps you want to focus on a specific learning objective in your curriculum standards for your grade level and content area.

You can:

1. Join an existing project
2. Design your own

There are many places on the WWW where teachers can find projects and activities that have already been developed. Many of these projects encourage global participation and include outlined time schedules and curriculum objectives. Much of the work has been done for you. If they match your curriculum needs, join in!

Kidlink is a global organization that promotes dialogue among students through secondary school. It provides a forum for many online projects in many languages.

1. Kidproj - provides global projects, long and short term, that begin at various times in the school year.
2. Kidforum - provides 6 week topics that are established before the September-June school year. Topics are on a fixed schedule.
3. Kidlink's "Who Am I?" Program - an eight month program with 6 modules
4. Kidlink's I Have a Dream project - A year long project which challenges students to make their dreams for a better world come true.

1. Global Schoolhouse collaborative learning projects
2. NickNacks Telecollaborate! - includes tips for designing a telecollaborative project.
3. European Schoolnet - Collaboration - Participate in a project

At times you might want to design your own online collaborative project that is tailored to the needs of your classroom and your content objectives. In the beginning of your online work with students it is probably easier to connect with one or two classroom teachers than to try to plan a global project inviting many teachers to join. Plan a small project or activity for your first attempt in joining the online educational world with your students. Don't try to handle more than your time allows.

Curriculum

Hawaii's Implementation of Standards-Based Reform

While using emerging technologies in the classroom it is important to remember that curriculum is at the heart of what we must teach our students. Use your curriculum guides and plan to use technology as a tool to enhance student learning. As you design your lessons and projects understand the needs of your students in relation to these guidelines and frameworks.

1. What do you want your students to know that they didn't know before?
2. What skills do you want to strengthen?
3. What do you want your students to be able to do that they didn't know how to do before?
4. What part of your project or activity is now possible because of technology that wouldn't be possible without it?

How will you use the Internet?

Once you have your curriculum goal in mind you should think about the level of Internet integration you would like to achieve. Exchanging keypal messages is the easiest road into the Internet for students and in many cases provides the hook that stimulates interest. A creative teacher will find ways to keep the students focused on the goals of the project by suggesting writing topics and activities that keypals can do together.

Click on the following link to read more about the levels or degrees of using the Internet with your students. Which one fits your needs at this time? You may find that during a school year you have opportunities to use several of these levels.

Levels of Integration

Design Your Project

Below are some suggestions to think about when designing an online project.

1. identify goals and objectives - Identify the skills from your content standards that you want to address in your project.
2. define a timeline - How long do you want your project to last? How often will contact, such as e-mail, be established with your online partners?
3. create a project outline - List the activities that your students will be doing.
4. define project activities - How will the students be achieving the goals of the project?
5. establish a partner class - Visit websites designed to connect classrooms such as epals.com
6. consider real time interactions - Will your class be interacting with their global partners in any real time activities such as IRC? Will time zones be an issue?
7. stimulate deep thinking - Encourage the students to think beyond the text they see on the screen. Help them move from data to information to insight.
8. establish evaluation rubrics - Show the students the criteria that will be used to evaluate their work. Some of the rubrics may be developed by the students.
9. publish student work - Make the work of your students visible for their partner classes as well as parents to see.