Tool #7: Reaching Outside your Classroom: Online Digital Projects

Online collaboration gives individuals the opportunity to share information across classrooms, cities, states, or countries. Well designed projects can target specific objectives and produce outcomes that all involved parties are sure to learn from. One of the greatest values I see in using this tool is that people are able to learn how others outside their environment experience everyday or educational issues. It truly expands their world beyond the classroom and neighborhood. With this in mind, I propose the following:

Students will write about, photograph, and discuss their daily lives, both on ordinary days and on special occasions. This will be implemented the beginning of the second nine weeks and continue to the middle of the third nine weeks. We will use both iEarn and Class2Class to deliver our project. These sites appear to address specific curriculum areas more than some of the others.

Students may document aspects of a typical day (like visiting the market or going to school) or they may document special days (like vacations, birthdays, celebrations, or holidays.) Students document their routines on the scheduled day, such as morning chores, breakfast, getting to school, school routines, after-school activities, community life, evening activities at home, etc. Then, students post and discuss their work in one of the forums.

I hope to get involvement from many classrooms from around the world. If no hits are received by mid-November, we will search for target audiences (listed on several of these sites) and ask for participation.