Last month Gold Hill 4th graders spent two nights at Barrier Island, an environmental camp on Seabrook Island, SC. Included in the three days of classes were lessons and activities about early Native Americans. Students learned about the history and culture of Cusabo tribes along the rivers and the coast of SC. In other classes, students learned about regional plants and animals, their adaptations and how Native American tribes respectfully lived among and used their natural resources.
We incorporated lessons learned into our On theTrail of the First People Project led by Karen Kleigman in NY at MidLink Magazine. Karen's organization of the project offered many new technology choices. The detailed instructions made this highly collaborative project easy to follow.
We set up a videoconference with Adam Dugger's class in NY- Hi y'all! During the Q& A it was evident that ALL students were amazed at the weather difference (unusually warm December in SC), the wide sandy shores, the frequency of bottle-nosed dolphin sitings, the palmetto trees in the maritime forest, the huge horseshoe crabs, and sleeping in cabins on the beach!
Back at school, our students created videos with Photostory3, a free download from Microsoft. Per Karen's instructions, I uploaded an example of student work on Google Video (Beta). I had a gmail account so this part went quickly.
Also with Photostory3/Google video I added a video documenting how we started using wikispaces.
See these videos and the project wiki for more information of starting wikis and other projects at your school. Better yet...go see see Karen Kleigman's presentation at FETC 2008
