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World Cultures Information Exchange

A "Teaching Children Social Studies using the Internet" project suggested by Marjorie Duby, retired practitioner Joseph Lee School




Project name: WORLD CULTURES INFORMATION EXCHANGE PROJECT *

Original access: a Kidsphere message posted from Chris Holtmeier, a teacher in Minnesota, looking for participants

Type of project: electronic mail

Discipline(s): Geography, map skills, reading, graphing, polling

Grade level: Middle-upper elementary with much teacher guidance

Goal/objective: Classrooms from around the world shared, collected, recorded, and compared data about their similarities and differences.

Description of the project: Participants were sent a list of questions each month. Teachers facilitated the collection of data from their students and sent a whole-class response to all participants. Participants then received responses from all project participants. Teachers were asked to contribute possible questions at the beginning of the project. Teachers were encouraged to share how they used the collected data in their classroom.

Time commitment:The project began in October, 1994 and ended in May, 1995

Telecommunications skills: electronic mail; possibility of distribution lists

Classroom management: There were 52 participants in this project so we would receive responses from each between the posting of one month's question and the introduction of another month's question.
We did large group discussion of the questions, decided upon our response, and had a student send our email response. We used the questions for interpretation of regional patterns. We created graphs and did our own polls. We saved electronic message contents in a spiral booklet to read.

Skills focus: globe and map location skills, interpretive reading as we analyzed the information on messages we received.


NOTE: Later this project was self-generated. Chris Holtmeier changed its focus from an electronic mail project, which has a tendency to get unwieldy, to a web-based project. As this project currently exists, your class would gather the information about themselves at your own pace, work on the information in class, perhaps as journal work, and when ready, enter their information on the Minnesota server. They would be able to compare and contrast your information with information posted on the server from current and past participants.

[ Practitioner classpage was sited at http://lee.boston.k12.ma.us/d4/D4.html | Designing a project ]

[ Project management: Historical Interview | Iditarod | Geogame | States | Back to School Nights ]

As of December 4, 2003, you are visitor to share our webpage.

Created: 1997
Last modified: October 18, 2006 by Marjorie Duby * , practitioner formerly of Joseph Lee School, Boston, MA

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