My Country Project, By Cristina Druta, November 2003

1. Teacher and Student Goals:
Teacher Goals
Teacher will be able to:

• Learn about how iearn works.
• Learn to introduce themselves.
• Learn to interact with teachers, classmates, students.
• Decide what project is appropriate for their students.
• Settle the Basic students knowledge.
• Identify the curriculum areas, skills and National Standards.
• Look for new and proper methods and procedures to show students how to participate in a collaborative project.
• Use the website skills.

Student Goals
Students will be able to:

• Develop and use skills that will allow them to participate in this project.
• Study their nation history, geography, civics, folklore, culture.
•  Learn about other countries culture and compare them.
• Register into iearn student forum, to write autobiography, to edit and add messages, to reply them.

2. Assessment of possible Projects and class interest:

• This was our first collaborative project. For both, me and my students, was something new and exciting. I started with my own class, but then, students from 5 to 8 class wanted to join us.
• We searched together for a proper project, based on their knowledge, curriculum area, starting from the idea to get to know better our country and other countries.
• We chose My country project because we can work on this project all year, and we can cover more subjects as: geography, history, civics, arts, folklore, English, etc.
• After discussions, Julie Nooan from Delaware school decided to participate in this project too.

3. Background knowledge:
a) Data base of resources:
         - textbooks, journals, World atlas, library books, encyclopedia, CD, internet sites, videos, maps.

b) Specific preinstruction and preparation:
          I explained to students how to use all resources, how to take out useful information, how to work with them. I present them Power point program and how it works.
c) Essential questions to investigate:

• What are your expectations from this project?
• What do you think that a foreign student will want to know about our country?
• What do you want to know about U.S.A?
• How can we use all the information we will gather?

4. Time Table of Lessons/Activities:
First week of October 27th-31th

• discussions about iearn and the selected project.
• presentation of œMy Country” project to the students.
• a pre-survey.
• distribute flyers with information from the forum.

Week of November 3rd- 7th

• as we had a week of holiday, we went in a trip around our city.
• students took pictures, observed the relief, rivers, monuments, the environment.

Week of November 6th-12th

• introduce project to the other students that joined us.
• teach Netiquette rules.
• discuss international education, how iearn works.
• about register students.
• time zone differences.
• doing first assignment: autobiography.

Week of November 12-16

• log into iEARN forum.
• edit and add messages.
• attach autobiographies.
• reply to messages.
• find information about our country.
• working in small groups.

Week of November 16-24

• gathering information about: history, geography, science, food, folklore, traditions, customs, ethical values, legends, myths, personalities.
• learning how to use Power point.
• create a power point depicting assigned culture area.
• share presentation with class.
• post the power point presentation on forum.

We will continue to research for this project about music, holidays(December), education (January), religion (February), special days( March), dress, gender roles(April).Before Christmas holiday we will edit and print a School Journal where we will include all these researches. When we started this project, we had not internet access in school. But now, after I insisted and I tried to convince my schoolmistress, we have it. For us was very difficult to work in these conditions, but we wanted  very much to do all our tasks.

5. Specific Lessons/Activities:

 When I introduced this project to students, I gave them first flyers and papers with information about iearn and projects. They put questions and were very interested from the beginning. I brought them to an internet cafª to show them how iearn works. Then we discussed why we chose this project and settled how much extra time we need to allocate, aside from school subjects (curriculum area). All the researches about our country we could tied into their curricular studies, and they really helped students to learn easier, to develop new skills, to work in team, to share the results of researches.
History, Geography, Culture, Civics, Folklore.

• They investigated and interpreted the phenomenon from geographical environment (relief, caves, ˜)
• They could compare previous notions with new observed facts.
• They have made assumptions and then made researches.
• Observed the environment deterioration, examined the causes and look for legal remedy of environmental protection
• Identified ethical and cultural values.
• Presented an historical fact, starting from information provided by historical sources.
• Expressed their own impressions.

6. Productivity of work:

• My students needed to learn how to post and send a message, how to reply, how to log into forum, how to use some search engines to find information, how to save on floppy.
• Some of them needed to learn to write in Word, to scann pictures. Then I showed them how can we utilize Power Point to create our presentation.
• They were organized in small groups for researching and report the required topics.
• Their work will be evaluated periodic according to their results and National Standards.

7. Conclusion of activity:

We will continue this project in the next few month, till April. We already made a Power point presentation and intend to design a webpage.