« Leadership Team Work | Main | Smart Boards Prevent Bored Students »
December 14, 2007 08:37 PM
Write (Around / Across) the World
The project began by learning to connect with other classroom teachers via E-Pals. Thus far, I have made connections with teachers in Germany and England. One wants to become pen pals as we conduct similar units and share information about each classes learning.
We are working to get all of our waivers (parent consent required under thirteen) so that we can obtain e-mail addresses for each student. Our district has asked all parties involved to be certified with I-safe in order to use E-Pals. I must note that only e-pals can send messages to other e-pal addresses. Our IT specialist will teach a safety class and proper etiquette when sending e-mails or searching the web.
Today, students received a demonstration with a piece of assistive handwriting technology called the Fly Fusion Pen. It is a pen which has a micro-camera and special paper used to import handwriting into a word document and either leave as is or convert to text. Both E-pals and Fly Fusion Pens have technology to translate language; however there is a small up charge of $810.00 for 30 pens to be upgraded with software capable of translating languages beyond very basic words like car, cat, dog...
Next, we will engage in writing interactively with classmates to test their e-mail accounts and editing procedures when importing handwriting into text.
We have created our bulletin board and added a few countries and soon the cities we plan to make contact with. Once we start getting letters we will post them on the bulletin board with a string connecting each city with the letter sent from that city to ours and out to a boarder made up of the letters they send us.
This project will allow students to teach our own community through publishing work shared with citizens throughout the world. Students will present information about their own learning by sharing letters and reports they create. They will be sharing and learning content by communicating with a captive audience. Students will also be using the data they collect to educate others about newly aquired knowledge that happens in a small corner of the world like Madras, Oregon. After all, how exciting can it be to present information to an old teacher or parent sitting in the same room when you can send messages around the world to a person your own age studying the same things?
Posted by twheeler on December 14, 2007 at 08:37 PM in Ed Tech Grants | Comments (0)
