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"Back to School Night Greetings"
A "Teaching Children about Social Studies using the Internet" project suggested by Marjorie Duby, retired practitioner at the Joseph Lee School
Project name: "Back to School Night" greetings
Original Access: Kidsphere, LearnNet, LM-NET
Type of project: electronic mail
Discipline(s): Geography, map skills, reading
Grade level: Middle-upper elementary with much teacher guidance
Goal/objective:
In preparation for our Back To School Night in September, 1994, I placed a message on a few listservs in an attempt to show the amazing reach, power, and potential of telecommunications.
This telecommunications project became a nightmare and turned into a teacher project because the responses totally exceeded what I thought would happen. Since there was not time to do the reading, saving, and printing at school, I gradually did it at home. My class members participated by helping to tally and sort the responses on tally sheets we devised.
Description of the project: I placed a message on 3 listservs. "Please send greetings to us at the Joseph Lee School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. We will shortly be having our Back to School Night and would like to show the expanse of the Internet on a USA and world map display. In addition, we are available as primary source people in the Boston area should any of you be looking for information or collaboration. My 4th graders (9-10 year olds) will be setting up our display. Send email messages to us, and I provided an email address for participants.
We received over 200 "greeting" responses from U.S. as well as non-U.S. sites. We selected some of those responses and posted them under categories of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. In class we discussed the personal geographic and school-related comments of respondees. We finished with a spiral bound booklet of complete responses available for people to browse.
Time commitment: Many, many hours for saving, printing. A few hours for tallying. A few hours for display.
Telecommunications skills: electronic mail
Classroom management: Pairs and groups working on tallying, sorting, arranging.
Skills focus: globe and map location skills, reading the messages which told a little about each area.
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Created in 1996.
Last modified: October 18, 2006 by Marjorie Duby, practioner formerly at Joseph Lee School, Boston, MA
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