Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Flat Stanley Gets an Upgrade

Most people have heard of the book, Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown, or at least have been part of the journey. Heck, now there is the Flat Stanley online project, and yes there is even an "app. for that". Fourth graders at Coastal Ridge Elementary School have been participating in a Flat Stanley project for quite some time now. The students trace themselves on giant pieces of paper and create their flat self. They then get into contact with family and friends world wide and send their flat self on a trip to discover life in a different area of our world. Family members, friends, and others send back these flat students with pictures, stories and postcards to help students understand the different cultures, people and trends in these areas.

Last year, the fourth grade team decided to upgrade their Flat Stanley project and add an Internet component to it. The students learned about the sport of geocaching with help from the tech. integrator, Eric Lawson. Geocaching is a treasure hunting game played all over the world using handheld GPS units instead of treasure maps. Small containers are hidden throughout the world by fellow geocachers, and a description and clues to the whereabouts are then posted online at www.geocaching.com. Most caches are hidden by the longitude and latitude coordinates of the container, but some can have more riddles, clues or even waypoints to find before getting to the treasure. By plugging in these coordinates, the GPS unit can get a geocacher pretty close to the hidden container. It's just up to the finder to then spot the container. There is a great introductory video about geocaching on the website for more information.

Snowboard Duck Travel Bug


Geocache containers often contain trinkets, or school supplies, that fellow geocachers will trade for when they find a cache. There are also travel bugs located in some caches, which aren't meant to be kept, but rather moved along to yet another geocache trying to fulfill its travel mission. The 4th graders at CRES thought it would be a great idea to create a class travel bug and track its movement across the globe like their Flat Stanley characters. Some classrooms have even created their own student web pages to share their travels and the new cultures, people, and spots they have visited. They are very excited to see where both, their flat selfs and classroom travel bugs, take them this year. To check out a few from last year visit Miss Switzer's Class web site.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Online Global Collaboration

ISTE shares in it's NETS-S and NETS-T standards that staff and students should learn the skills to collaborate online with different people across the globe. This offers global collaboration, but also gives a different perspective to a project. Even though the benefits for this project highly out weigh the setup time and preparation, it is a difficult concept for teachers to fully grasp in my district. It's certainly a shift in thinking by extending the classroom walls out to the globe. Some staff members are just not ready for this shift, and some are scared of the possible problems that may arise in creating and delivering a unit such as this one.

I recently jumped in to an online conference with my Personal Learning Network (PLN), the Seedlings, with the guest speaker, Cherrie MacInnes, a 3rd Grade teacher from Brewer, Maine. Her classroom project started as an online video conference between a few classrooms across Maine and turned out to be a national project. She made headlines when her class was able to Skype with classrooms from each of the 50 United States. Listening to her speak about the project, and the enthusiasm that the students had towards learning from their peers in different parts of the country, was outstanding! This is exactly why ISTE has encouraged online collaboration and video conferencing in their standards for students and staff. Personally, I don't know what I would do as a tech. integrator without my online PLN's and the ability to collaborate online with other tech. integrators across the state, country and world.

Online projects are becoming more and more popular with lead tech. savvy teachers and 21st century innovators. You just have to start with a quick Google search to see what I mean, but there are still those that are reluctant to put the time in to plan a collaborative online project. Project based learning with multimedia is not a new concept. It's been around since the early 90's, however, in the last 5 years the Internet has grown and allowed any user to become a publisher (Web 2.0). Ten years ago, when I first started teaching in my third grade classroom, I did not anticipate that students would have their own web presence, web pages, or post pictures, videos and podcasts for the whole world to view straight from their phones. For the most part, that was still up to the tech. staff to organize these files, or a web master to publish work in the classroom to a web resource. Kids are doing it on their own, and it is up to educators to instruct them and guide them to use these outlets for high quality educational purposes. We can either grab a hold of this and expand our classroom walls, or sit back and allow kids to play on their own. The latter scares me a bit though, as kids don't always know what the right decisions are when they are completely independent.

This past Sunday, I participated in a wonderful online collaborative project, One Day on Earth. If you haven't checked out the web site yet for One Day on Earth, it's worth the trip. There are trailers and explanations of the project, as well as video uploads to browse. The thought behind One Day on Earth, was to have cameras and people tell stories from every country on all 7 continents on one particular day, 10.10.10. These pictures, mobile uploads and high definition films will be mashed up and archived on the web site, and a select few will be combined to create a global documentary about our One Day on Earth on October 10th, 2010.

Living on the east coast here in southern Maine, I jumped at the chance to participate, and thought that filming the sunrise at the beach would be inspiring and calming. My video, Sunrise at Wells Beach, has been uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube as well as the One Day on Earth web site. I also took pictures with my iPhone and created an Animoto slideshow as well. As a classroom teacher, I would have loved to have had my students participate in this project. In addition to my film experience, I have met a lot of great educators, innovators, and filmers from all of the world. It was a truly amazing experience for me, and I hope that I can share my journey with this project and inspire others to jump on board with online collaborative projects as well.