Global Virtual Classroom Project—GVC06-13The World is Our Classroom

Exploring Our Waters

GVC Reflections and Summary

Though we are in distant parts of the world, collaboration among students and faculty of the three schools enrolled as GVC06-13 was the key element during the entire team project. The first two months of the project were spent getting familiar with the expectations of the project (for the new comers!) and getting to know one another. No doubt, there were “fumbling moments” as all participants learned new ways to communicate, to share ideas at-a-distance, and to try out emerging technologies.

Various technologies as well as traditional means (snail mail, telephone) helped us to build friendships and foster teamwork among students and staff from the three schools. Taiwan students introduced themselves with an original video which was “streamed” to students in Canada and the USA. Students from Canada created name pictures to help the Taiwan students understand their video introductions. Goodies packages were exchanged between students from the three schools. All the kids and staff were quite thrilled with snail mail package contents. Wonderful bulletin board displays have impressed other staff members and neighboring classrooms. Some students visited a website that translated their names to Mandarin Chinese, the language spoken in Taiwan. They sent a message to their Taiwan “buddies” telling them what their Chinese names were. At Doverwood, we learned,”Ne how. Wo jeau ___. Wo yi shi sui. Ne je sui la .Ni jia you ji kou ren?”, which loosely means, “Hello, How are you? My name is___ . I’m 11 years old. How old are you? How many people are in your family?” It would have been great to learn “O’ Canada” in Mandarin, but that is way too difficult.

Staff from schools regularly met using videoconferencing and learned how to track ideas using printable notes during these meetings. Students introduced themselves, asked questions and shared ideas during the video conferences. It appeared to be the first time that many students had experienced streaming video and how it differed from a televised program. Many have MSN type experience but not like this, where chat is used as a tool to accomplish a common goal for school.

The features of Internet Classroom Assistant were used moderately as faculty became familiar with their potential uses. It is the policy of many school districts such as ECS, to closely monitor elementary-middle school student communications, including email. The potential of this ICA feature was probably not fully realized due to this. Students used the ICA email feature to post short biographies introducing themselves to students from the partner schools. Another ICA feature allowed students to share links to websites of water games that they found, evaluated, and described to their peers. We did appreciate how ICA allowed the judges to moderate the collaboration aspect of the project and to initiate getting to know our partners.

	Doverwood Public School, Canada Port Dover, Ontario, is on Lake Erie, one of the 5 Great Lakes of North America. Our explorations investigated this magnificent body of fresh water. Where once the waters of Long Point Bay were clouds, now thanks to the zebra mussel, the waters are clear.
Epiphany Cathedral School, USA Venice, Florida, USA, is in the southwest area of the state on the Gulf of Mexico. We discovered much new knowledge about this grand body of salt water. Venice is a shark tooth capital, with hundreds found along it's beaches. It is also prone to the Red Tide affecting it's beautiful beaches.
	Da-Qiao Elementary School, Taipei, Taiwan, Taiwan is an island in East Asia off the coast of China, south of Japan and north of the Philippines. We explored the glorious waters surrounding Taiwan which include the China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the Pacific Ocean.

Having students from the three distant sites come to consensus about a common theme was a “first” experience for the majority of students (and staff!). Strategies such as brainstorming, large and small group discussions, and facilitation by student leaders resulted in a common theme, “Exploring Our Waters.” From this, 5 groups were created to investigate these topics: Threats to Our Waters, Water Activities, Water Quality, Pollution, Uses of Water. A concept map developed by the Doverwood team was used as a visual aid, to guide our planning and activities.

One of the more exciting GVC activities was a “collaborative art project.” Doverwood students created original pictures with our water theme and snail-mailed them to Florida students who then enhanced the creations. These are posted on our GVC website on a link, Art Slide Show.

The Art Slide Show also includes original student creations of GVC title pages (also on the website). Doverwood students used several media software packages (Corel Draw, Photoshop, etc.) to create these and were helpful with their descriptions of how the title pages were developed. A quote from one of the Doverwood students says it all:

“I thought it was neat that we could make the same type of graphics as the people who are paid to do this stuff. Even after comparing our graphic designs to the advertisements in magazines we think ours are comparable. Hey, there may be a job future in graphic design for some of us.”

Students built new knowledge using various types of investigations and explorations such as field trips, science experiments, hands-on labs, visits to classrooms by resource people, primary research including interviews of experts such as a local newspaper columnist and a seafood restaurant owner. Students were introduced to “Boolean searching” of the Internet as they looked for online games related to water issues. Students had to evaluate the games and write descriptions before posting URLs to the online games in ICA in the “links” area. Great fun was had by all!

Multimedia was the “name of the game” as students utilized traditional media (newspapers, books, movies) as well as various software packages (Explorer, Picasa, PowerPoint, Word, Corel, Photoshop, Microsoft Office Picture Manager, Paint, etc.). Though students had a strong preference for using Google as a search engine, they were encouraged to try new and different ones that were more age appropriate. Finding “credible” sources of information was continually emphasized as well as citing sources.

GVC faculty learned along with students which can be summarized with, “Teaching is indeed the highest form of learning.”