The speaker is Kim Lord, 8th grade science teacher from Bellbrook Middle School, and her collaborator is Tony Breen from Plockton High School in Scotland. The two met at Space Camp at NASA.
She introduced the project by showing their introductory videos--each school put together a video to introduce themselves--showed the local sites, interests, sports, stuff they do for fun. A cool assignment in and of itself, but much more interesting when done with such authentic purpose.
They used Skype to do live chats and IM with the class in Scotland. They also use it for file sharing since it can handle the size of video files and the like. Parents were asked to sign a permission slip before the project began.
There is a slight delay that takes a little getting used to. They suggested getting a usb extension cable so you can move your webcam around easily.They live chat about 2x a month--her morning students with his afternoon students (5 hour difference)
She described some examples of assignments they did:
- monthly discussions comparing and contrasting local geography and earth science.
- sundial experiments and creation of Excel spreadsheets/tables of the data; they could observe that the sun mid-winter was at different spots at different longitudes.
- discussing differences in weather--Scotland is usually milder in winter but they had their coldest winter on record--real life data for the discussion of ocean currents and weather parents
- several students volunteered to read Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer (teaming with Language Arts teacher) and they had a cross-Atlantic discussion.
- Cultural discussions--sports, entertainment, music, pranks, etc.
Social Networking
http://weareteachers.com/
Microgrants available--you get $200 and a flip camera. You have to find sign up but it helps you find teachers to collaborate with.
http://digitalwish.com/
Deep discount on flip cameras (limit 4)
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