Search Results
When conducting a search for resources for my TechQuest project, I focused on a few aspects of the project. This included resources for mini-lessons to use in the classroom alongside the TechQuest project to make sure that I do not conduct the project in isolation, resources to help me understand some other ways that schools and educators have used collaboration to help bring the world to their students, and resources that may help in the implementation of the project. For the most part, I was pleased with the results.
Mini-lesson Resources:
Facing the Future - This website contains free downloads for curriculum on global issues and sustainability. Some of these resources could be used for mini-lessons to help students think critically about what to include in their survey, how they would like to incorporate learning about these issues with collaboration with people around the world, and begin to apply what they learn. Facing the Future also provides background information on global issues and ideas for service learning.
Globalization 101 - This site also provides suggested lesson plans on a variety of issues and "issue briefs" that describe some fundamentals for particular issues. It also provides news analysis and videos on different issues.
Schools Using Collaboration Resources
ePals - ePals provides safe collaborative technology for schools to connect. It includes ePals projects that allow for collaboration through the use of forums and the opportunity to connect with classrooms around the world. This site also includes a classroom finder to help connect classrooms as well as a student page that provides the chance to respond to questions and see what students around the world say.
Sister Schools - This is a program that links schools in Seattle with school programs in Uganda. It specifically works to help students in the U.S. learn social responsibility by learning to serve those who are in need.
Students of the World - This French non-profit association seeks to bring world culture's to young people around the world. You can find pen-pals, blogs, and forums for use around the world.
Seeds of Learning - Seeds of Learning has a sister school program that pairs U.S. classrooms with classrooms in Central America. They send themed packets to each other throughout the school year.
The Teachers Corner - This site provides schools the opportunity to engage in collaborative online projects. It also provides schools the opportunity to find pen pals or key pals. Collaboration projects allow students to work on the same topic and share activities, findings, and reflections online.
Implementing the Project Resources
ePals - The portion of this site described above that could aid in the implementation of my project is the chance to upload your own projects. This could be an option for us as we continue to work on our project.
Learning from the Search
Global issues, globalization, and collaboration are current hot topics in education. Therefore, this search was fairly easy to conduct. I mostly used Google and felt that this provided the information I needed. In some ways, there is a wealth of information out there, so the tricky part can be sifting through it to see what is actually useful. I discovered that there are many sister schools programs as well as sites offering school pen pals. Next time I may search for journals that provide articles on specific schools and what they have done that worked really well. It seems that even though this idea doesn't seem to have a strong verbal push, the number of resources available that allow schools around the world to collaborate is quite numerous. I'll be interested to see how this plays out in the future and whether we will see this more as organizations move towards using Web 2.0 technologies to connect these schools.
No comments:
Post a Comment