Connect 2.0

Mrs. R and Ms. H’s classes have just finished a fabulous globally collaborative project, called “Life ‘Round Here,” with students from 11 different schools around the world! The goal of the project was to allow students to share their personal viewpoint about life in their country and to connect with other students to get a “kid’s eye” view into life in different countries.

Here at ISB, we were very excited to work on this project as part of our Adaptation unit. Building on the concepts of how Native Americans adapted to the challenges of their environment, we developed questions to connect our learning to our personal experience.

Our essential questions for this unit were:

• What is life like here in Thailand?
• How have we adapted to life in Thailand?
• How have Thai people adapted to the influence of international culture?

Because we have such a diverse student population, we were able to create groups of students with similar cultural backgrounds to tell the story of their adaptation to Thailand. In Mrs. R’s class we had Korean, European, Japanese and Taiwanese, and American groups, each telling their own story of how life in Thailand is different than in their home countries, and how they have had to adapt to their new lives here. We also had a Thai group that reflected on how Thai culture has adapted to the influence of international culture. In Ms. H’s class we also had European,  American, and Thai groups. In addition, we had an Asian group (with students from Indonesia, Hong Kong, China, and Korea), a Kuwait group, and a South American group. You can find all of our completed movie on the IT’s Elementary podcast channel!

These projects took us about a month to complete. We started by watching a sample video to get our classes excited about the project. We developed a list of tips for creating a quality digital story:

• kept it simple
• you can learn lots of information from a video
• use effects only when needed, when they enhance the content (not so many that they’re distracting)
• integrate different types of images (like screen shots of Google Earth)
• make sure music fits with the slideshow
• use titles to organize your movie into main themes – this needs to be planned in advance
• use categories within categories to further organize
• keep the titles consistent
• photos can represent a lot about a topic

We then brainstormed our big ideas for each group project. In our groups we discussed:

• What is the story we would like to tell about our adaptation to Thailand?
• What are the key points we need to highlight?

Next, we wrote detailed scripts based on our big ideas and found pictures that tell the story visually.

Finally, this week, we put all the stories together into group iMovie projects – first adding our pictures, then titles to organize the sections, and then recording our voices.

Our completed digital stories are posted on the Life ‘Round Here ISB page, so please check them out! Here’s one sample project from Mrs. R’s class to get you started:

Download Video: Posted by mscofino at TeacherTube.com.

You can also view the other digital stories from our internationally collaborative partners here.

Over the next few days we will spend some time reflecting on our learning, watching the completed videos, and even conducting a Skype video conference with some of the participants from other international schools! This has been an exciting, engaging and motivating experience for both the students and the teachers. We can’t wait to read some of their personal reflections about this adventure! We will be posting our stories on our individual student blogs (linked here on the sidebar) beginning next week. Feel free to read and comment anytime!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 8:08 am and is filed under 21st Century Literacy, Global Collaborations, grade 5. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.