Collaborative Project

Even though it was rather long, I found Kevin Honeycutt's podcast very interesting and amusing. If you didn't get enough information about the collaborative projects he described during the podcast, you should check out his website for more information, www.kevinhoneycutt.org.  Because I'm not a teacher, I had some difficulty with coming up with an idea for a collaborative project. Luckily for me, my husband is a fifth grade teacher with a Masters in Educational Technology, so I collaborated with him on this assignment. 

His fifth grade students are learning about different environmental habitats or land biomes. We thought a way to make this learning experience more genuine and utilize 21st century skills would be to create a collaborative news report about the effects of global warming on different habitats. Students in his class, living in the temperate deciduous forest, could collaborate with students in the desert habitat of Nevada and with students living in the rain forests of Brazil. (Keep in mind this is a hypothetical project. We don't actually know people in all these places).  Each class working as a team, being experts in their land biome, would do research and create a news cast comparing current weather patterns, annual temperatures, precipitation levels, wild life, and pressing issues currently compared to 50 years ago.  Students in each class can collaborate on the format of the news cast through video or teleconferencing. Once the separate news casts are complete, the classes can work together to create a wiki that contains each video, and pages with the facts and other information.