Projects


 Global Map

As an educator for more than thirty years, I have designed and implemented many interactive projects. From 1990 -1994, most of them included telecommunications. At the end of this page you will learn how all of these projects came about.

Many thanks to the host of people who have written to tell me they have enjoyed reading this page. It is heartening to hear from other educators who are seeking further information about how to run such projects. Alas, time does not permit me to provide, via an e-mail message, the level of detail required. Thus, I refer interested parties to a chapter I authored which gives in-depth information on the topic. The book, published by Artech, is edited by Andrew Cohill and Andrea Kavanaugh and is titled Community Networks: Lessons from Blacksburg, Virginia. Look for it in your local library, or if you prefer to order it, here's the information you'll need: Artech House Publishers, 685 Canton Street, Norwood, MA 02062. Order book BB896. Cost is $39. ISBN: 0-89006-896-8. E-mail Artech using this address: artech@artech-house.com. Web address is: http://www.artech-house.com.

Telecommunications Projects:

Since the early 1990s, students in Montgomery County have had access to the Internet through Virginia's Public Education Network. Then, funding from an NSF grant written by the Computer Science department of Virginia Tech, in conjunction with the school division, allowed all schools to connect to the Internet via the Blacksburg Electronic Village. Through the use of telecommunications, my students have had the opportunity to participate in many projects resulting in worldwide contacts which have fostered greater global understanding. Descriptions of a few of the projects I designed and implemented follow. For details on how to develop and set up your own Internet projects, read my chapter, "Learning and Teaching in a Virtual School," in a recently released book by Artech, Community Networks: Lessons Learned from Blacksburg, Virginia.

A Comparison of Social Problems

Fourth and fifth graders at Bethel Elementary compared the social problems of Virginia with those in other countries. The students composed the following letter which they sent by e-mail to volunteers in over a dozen countries:

Hello.

We are a group of nine and ten year old students who are studying world geography. This morning we had a class discussion focusing on the greatest social problems in our state, the Commonwealth of Virginia. Our list of problems included the following:

After looking at these problems closely, we believe a common root cause for most of these problems is a lack of education. If people were better educated, many of these problems would be lessened.

We then looked at this fact: In Virginia our government spends six times as much incarcerating each prisoner than it does on each child attending school. We believe if we had better leaders, perhaps these amounts could be switched and many of our social problems would be eventually be solved. If schools received the increased funding, we could have better equipment, more books, more teachers, programs designed to meet the real needs of learners, and so on. This would lead to more people being better educated.

What do you believe to be the greatest social problem in your country? What do you believe are the causes? What solutions would you recommend?

Thank you for taking the time to help us.

Responses arrived from Italy, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Britain, France, Canada, Sweden, and many other countries. One interesting reply, from Hong Kong, stated the following:

I told the kids we had e-mail from Hong Kong. As always, they located Hong Kong on the world map. "Gosh, it's small," one of them commented. I explained that the correspondent had described the greatest social problem as expensive housing. The students and I trundled down to the cafeteria and, on the floor, used tape to mark a rectangle that equaled 400 square feet. We planned how we could use the space if it were an apartment. The kids complained that the space was far too small for a family. I then explained that our correspondent had described this size as an average apartment, one that is costly. I had students estimate what an expensive apartment this size might cost. Their final total was $70,000. Returning to our work area, I revealed the actual cost. Of course they were stunned. Our discussion went on to consider reasons for such a high value. Just as I had guessed, the students surmised that Hong Kong is land poor. I gave them the second piece of information--hoarding of land by developers--and told them they needed to devise a solution to this problem. Their solution matched the one suggested by the correspondent.

Putting Historical Events into Perspective

Students in the United States spend much time studying two interesting time periods--the late 1700s and the mid 1800s, focusing particularly on the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War. But where do these events fit into the big scheme of things? The United States is not the navel of the universe; what else was happening in the world at these times? Fourth and fifth graders at Bethel Elementary School found out through an e-mail project. The following letter was sent to volunteers in twelve different countries:

Hello.

We are nine and ten year olds who are studying United States history. The time periods we are studying are 1760-1790 and 1850-1870. We would like you to answer two questions for us:

1. What do you believe is the most historically significant event of the time periods 1760-1790 and 1850-1870?

2. In the time periods given, what is the most historically significant event of your country?

Thank you for helping us.

Responses were carefully charted and looked at in depth. Students learned that the rise of democracy was listed most often for the late 1700s. Students spent many days referring to the large wall chart and continued to comment and draw conclusions.

Shakespeare and Mark Twain

At Margaret Beeks Elementary School fourth graders had great fun learning about William Shakespeare and Mark Twain and their writings. The excitement grew when the class located both authors on line who, via e-mail, wrote encouraging letters and answered the multitude of questions the students had about the authors' lives and their works. Talk about making literature come to life! These young students fell in love with Shakespeare, and while, they enjoyed corresponding with Twain, found his works to be somewhat troublesome. They made Shakespeare's words their own. One day, on the playground, a boy began bedeviling a very diminutive girl. She looked at him in disgust and intoned, "You loathsome toad!"

CU-SeeMe

Fifth graders at Riner Elementary School compared the geography of southwest Virginia to that of Bellevue, Washington, first by exchanging e-mail and finally by participating in a CU-SeeMe exchange with the students at Sunsite Elementary School. Disney, Inc. sent a production company to film the exchange which aired on a special during the summer of 1995--"Epcot: Journey to Discovery."

Connecting School to Home Using Computers

This project was in place from 1995 through 1999. Our goal was to provide every student in a rural fifth grade classroom with a computer to take home. The computers were networked to the school via the Blacksburg Electronic Village. Parents and students were trained to use e-mail and other on-line resources. The idea for this came about one lazy August day when a Virgina Tech professor and I were sipping coffee in Bollo's. I said, "You know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to take an entire classroom, provide all the kids with computers both at school and at home, and network everything together making the technology a seamless support for a teacher running a constructivist classroom. E-mail would allow better home-school communication, and students could learn to use the Internet as part of their repertoire of resources." the professor enthusiastically responded, "Let's do it!"

We worked on a proposal for a year and a half, regularly seeking funding sources. Daily contact between the school and the home was one important goal. Easy access to the World Wide Web's educational resources was another. Our hope was that computer literacy skills would be enhanced by this project and that student-parent-school interaction would be positively impacted. Ultimately the project received $700,000 in funding from the Department of Education in Washington. I studied the class the first year; this work became the basis of my doctoral dissertation which can be accessed on-line through the NDLTD project.

Student-Run Literature Contest

Fifth graders at Margaret Beeks Elementary School hosted a national literature contest. Each week a team of students wrote a set of clues about a fictional character. Monday through Thursday clues were posted as to the character's identity. Monday's clues were hardest; by Thursday the clues were fairly easy. Students from thirty-one locations throughout the world participated, sending their guesses in by noon on Friday. Every Friday afternoon a list of "winners" was e-mailed to the participants. The following year a request came in for a repeat of the contest. Another school volunteered to run it and did so successfully. The project continues to this day.

Sunrise-Sunset

Contacts in thirty locations world wide sent the exact times of sunrise and sunset for January 11th. Fifth graders at Margaret Beeks took this raw data and first compiled it into a table, converting all times to a 24-hour clock for easy subtraction. The amount of daylight was calculated and students made a bar graph beginning on the left with the location experiencing the least sunlight. Then, the students took a blank world map and numbered the locations from the North to the South Pole. "Ahas!" were exclaimed as the students discovered the correlation between the amount of sunlight and the location on Earth. Of course, one student queried, "If Antarctica has the most sunlight, why is it the coldest place?" This led to an ad hoc science lesson about the earth's 23 1/2 degree tilt.

World Geography

On many occasions I found contacts throughout the world who agreed to assist my students in learning geography. Fifth graders at Margaret Beeks generated a generic list of questions to send to each location. A serendipitous happening provided us with the most fascinating information. One student suggested a final question: "Is there anything interesting or unusual about your country which our other questions have not addressed?" When they heard back from Singapore, the contact told the students they might find it interesting that in Singapore it is illegal to chew gum, and you can be fined for not flushing the toilet! At first the students thought this was funny, but a discussion of personal freedoms followed. After reading the respondent's other answers more carefully, students soon realized that a large number of people live in a country which is only nine miles wide and fourteen miles long! Further discussion led students to understand that the folks in Singapore have given up many personal freedoms to live in a save and clean environment.

The following year, Michael Faye, an American teenager was dealt a harsh punishment for spray painting graffiti--caning. One of my former students came by to see me. "Ms. M., everyone in my class was shocked that Singapore would allow such harsh punishments. But I remember what we learned last year and wasn't surprised at all."

Comparison of Consumer Consumption

A fourth grade classroom at Margaret Beeks Elementary School made a comparative study of the amount of consumer goods they owned with the goods owned by people in other countries. The families of the twenty-six students, who are residents of Blacksburg, answered the student-designed survey telling how many bicycles, cars, microwave ovens, etc. they owned. Using e-mail, students administered the same survey to twenty-six people in foreign locations. A comparison of the data showed that Americans owned many, many times the consumer goods of people in other countries, yet used them less.

Interactive Talk

After the fourth grade class at Margaret Beeks studied the country of Wales, they made contact with a graduate student living in Bangor. Paul Mather agreed to participate in an interactive talk session with the young students. While on-line with Paul, the fourth graders discovered that while they were preparing to go to lunch, he was getting ready to go home for dinner. Suddenly time zones became real for these students and made sense! After learning much more about Wales through this talk session, the students continued an e-mail relationship with their new friend. I demonstrated how to use lines of longitude to figure time in any location. For weeks afterward, every single globe in the school resided in my classroom. The kids couldn't keep their hands off of them. Every now and then I'd hear cries such as this, "Guess what! It is already ten o'clock tomorrow morning in New Zealand." How many kids do you know who are in love with lines of longitude?

Snail Mail Versus E-mail

Fourth graders at Margaret Beeks Elementary compared the amount of time it takes a letter sent from England by standard post (snail mail) to arrive in Blacksburg, Virginia with the length of time it takes a letter to arrive by e-mail. Our English contact mailed a letter from Northeast England via air mail. Students made predictions as to when the letter would arrive and made a class graph of the results. The predictions ranged from three days to two weeks. Already aware that e-mail is quite fast, students made predictions for the e-mail letter, and again, graphed the results. Eight days later the snail mail letter arrived. It required a mere thirty-eight seconds for the e-mail letter to arrive. One student was so intrigued with this information that he figured out mathematically just how many times faster the e-mail was.

French Fries

Seventh graders at Auburn Middle School conducted a quantitative study of French fries. After learning the terms mode, median, range, and mean, the students purchased a regular order of French fries from four fast food restaurants: Hardee's, Wendy's, Burger King, and McDonald's. The length of each French fry was carefully measured in centimeters and the data were analyzed to determine the amount of centimeters per penny in each order. The students determined that the French fries from Wendy's were, by far, the best buy. The information was uploaded to a school in California where it was compiled with information gathered world wide. After, a qualitative analysis was made as students munched cold French fries. There was no clear winner here. Different students preferred French fries from different restaurants.

Cockney Rhyming Slang

Do you know why we call money "bread?" Fourth graders at Margaret Beeks found out when they compiled a list of Cockney rhyming slang phrases which they gathered by e-mail. What is Cockney rhyming slang? It is a coded language invented in the nineteenth century by Cockneys so they could speak in front of the police without being understood. Selected words are coded in two-word phrases which rhyme with the original word. However, only the first word of the phrase is used in conversation. Thus, "bread and honey" equals money and is called "bread." Other Cockney expressions are: "dog and bone" for telephone and "apples and pears" for stairs. One might fall down the apples in an attempt to answer the dog in a hurry. After collecting the many, many phrases, students wrote sentences for each other to decode. Can you guess what this means? His boat lit up when he found his lost titfer.

The students uploaded their dictionary to schools that requested a copy after they read our announcement on a newsgroup. As always, chaos theory prevailed and lively exchanges ensued that extended our learning. (I particularly love projects where I learn right along with my students.) We received information about English backwards slang as well as more entries for our rhyming dictionary. Then, one day, months later a snail mail letter arrived from Australia. An older gentlemen had heard about our project from a teacher friend. He did not have Internet access, but wanted us to learn about Aussie rhyming slang, too. Quite similar to Cockney slang, Aussie slang was imported from England when settlers moved to Australia years ago. Our correspondent enthralled us with a warm story about sitting on his grandfather's knee as a child, listening to and learning Aussie slang. He had all but forgotten this experience until his talk with his teacher friend jogged the memory loose.

Discovering Earth's Fault Lines

Each day fifth graders at Margaret Beeks Elementary School checked the earthquake report on the University of Michigan's online weather service. A colored push pin was inserted into the earthquake site on a world map mounted on a bulletin board. After several months, students were able to locate the major fault lines on the earth by looking at the pattern of the push pins.

Iditarod

The excitement of the Iditarod was brought into fourth and fifth grade classrooms at Margaret Beeks via e-mail. Several times each day a school in Ohio sent updates of the race via e-mail. Previously, students had studied the Iditarod and read the book Race Against Death. A map of Alaska was displayed and students traced the course. Students began to root for certain racers, and the girls, in particular, loved that women sometimes win this test of endurance and commitment. (Go, Susan Butcher!) Straight pins with small paper pennants labeled with the names of racers, which students can move on the map when the updates arrive, make this an exciting project.

 

Pre-telecommunications Projects:

Celebrity Auctions

Back in the early 1980s, my fourth grade students at Gilbert Linkous Elementary School wrote to hundreds of celebrities giving them the opportunity to help children learn to be better readers. Students earned "money" for our auction by reading. At the end of the year, a local auctioneer came to school and held a real auction out on the front lawn. Students bid for the many donated items. Some of the more popular items donated included these:

Hot Air Balloon Project

In this project conducted at Gilbert Linkous, students earned bookplates autographed by popular children's' authors including

Each month students had the opportunity to earn a particular bookplate by reading for pleasure. As students read, they earned miles and moved their small hot air balloon cutouts across a world map. Any child who went "around the world" in his/her balloon by the end of the month earned a bookplate given out in a special ceremony.

In addition, Maxie Anderson, world famous balloonist, donated autographed pictures of his transatlantic balloon crossing. Maxie sent letters of encouragement to the students and planned telephone contact with the class from his intended balloon venture circumnavigating the globe. Unfortunately, Maxie's balloon voyage had to end early. (Years later, I was deeply saddened when this good man died in a balloon accident in France.)

At the end of the school year, a hot air balloonist from North Carolina came to Blacksburg, and early one May morning, the class met at a local farm. That Saturday each student took a tethered balloon ride, rising high above the local terrain.

You, too, can do it!

You've read descriptions of a few of the projects I've designed over the years. Anyone can do the same with minimal effort. Need ideas? Follow the lead of your students. Every single project I ever ran was the result of a comment or question made by a child. My advice to you is to listen, listen, listen when your students talk to you, to their friends, or to the entire class. I've never met a student who did not have interests. (As Susan Winebrenner has said on many occasions, "I've never met a student who wouldn't do his work. I've met plenty, however, who won't do yours.") Students will guide you in providing rich learning opportunities for them. Trust them. They will love you for it!

For more information contact Melissa Matusevich, melissa@bev.net.

Copyright (c) 1994-2002, Melissa N. Matusevich. Please obtain permission from the author before reproducing this material.
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