Collaborative+Projects

===    Unity is strength... when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved. Mattie Stepanek          ===

This page has been designed to illustrate all of the exciting and academically challenging projects we have signed up to participate in this year. Please visit these sites to learn more about what we are working on in class as well as what are future goals may be! As we start working on these projects, you will see the Table of Contents on the side of this page enlarge as we make linked pages which will host all of our hard work.

Kids Design Challenge 2009
**Welcome to the 2009 Design Kids Challenge, a collaborative on-line project, which offers students the opportunity to provide creative design solutions to real life problem.**  Students use their creativity to review, select one design and engineering problem presented by Kids Design Network and devise a creative solution to the problem. Student designers submit their work to their design partners who analyze the creativity, originality, approach, and effectiveness of the design. Designers then use their partner's evaluation and suggestions to revise their original solutions and refine designs to submit a final Design or Build. All student designers and teachers participating get the opportunity to vote on the top three design solution for each Design Challenge. All winners will advance to the finals round where professional designers and engineers will review their solutions and determine the Best Design of each Design Challenge Category. Environmental Awareness Classroom  Our project will uncover the secrets to encouraging healthy and successful relationships between humans and animals. Our hope is to investigate different types of birds in our our area, their habitats, feeding, behaviors. adaptations, and migration. In addition, we have extended our investigations and exploration to include society's impact on how birds and other animals throughout our community thrive or diminish. Our goal is to provide information, resources and collaborative opportunities to aid our community in providing a better way of life for these animals. We invite you to view our webpage and take part in many of the collaborative pieces presented by our class.

1001 Flat World Tales Project 
 Welcome elementary school students and teachers! Welcome to the second elementary school workshop for the 1001 Flat World Tales project! A "Flat Classroom" writing workshop between international and public schools around the world. We are using the story telling format of 1001 Nights to tell a new story, a story of our world. The format of 1001 Nights is unique, with thousands of different stories embedded within the one main story. We hope that our student stories will become "never ending tales," with each links to different individual stories embedded within our one overarching story. Our story starts   here <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">

Kids Election 2008
<span style="color: rgb(220, 71, 71);"><span style="color: rgb(216, 59, 59); font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">** Intermediate Grades throughout our school district study the branches of government and citizenship/voting. Since this is a presidential election year, we will be expanding these units of study for ATP students in 4th, 5th and 6th by comparing and analyzing political stances. Students will form news reporting teams and be able to choose a piece of election process /government to explore and report on. Examples may include the history of voting, presidential history, functions of government, importance of voting, campaign commercials, and local voice (where is your voice heard). Students will use a variety of formats to report their findings by developing news broadcasts using video, podcast, web page. Other students from around the United States will share and discuss their research findings with my students on wikispaces. We will also be exploring elections within a small sample as by conducting straw polls on survey monkey/on line web polls to compare and contrast our community/state with other classrooms. We are hoping to have representation from all regions. Students will explore current candidates and issues. The project culminates with the analysis of voting patterns- class to other student voters, class to city and state and country. As well as, students vote in a mock election and report on how they made their decision. It is our hope that our classrooms as well as our collaborating partners will take it to the next level by ** constructing 2 minute video message for the president before his inauguration date in January.

[|O.R.E.O. Project 2008]
A.K.A Our Really Exciting Online Project This year's project will invite classrooms to have each student stack Oreo® cookies as high as he or she can and then average each student's highest result to achieve a final Class result. We will then compare our collaborating partners' results to our own by gathering data and then anylzing and synthesizing the information using mathematical tools and knowledge to formulate new approaches to the challenge. This project focuses on utilizing the scientific methods, working collaboratively with group members to draw on our strengths and make progress on our teamworking skills, tap into data analysis concepts taught in mathematics, and our abilities to look at information with a crtical eye.

[|A Room With a View 2008]
Every wonder what other students see as they daydream out their classroom? This project captures each student's academic strength by challenging them to demonstrate their view from tthe ATP room. Students will brainstorm ways they would like to express what they see as they utilize skills of sensory images, imagery through a visual perspective, written or oral expression, and creativity abilities. With a variety of media resources,students will be exposed to technolgies such as podcasts, digital camecorders, digtial cameras as well as many software resources to publish their "views." Other collaborate classrooms throughout the country and world will be publishing their "views" for our class to see which will open rich discussions about culture, climate, economics, weather, and environmental surroundings.

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Math Connections
<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">This is a wonderful project developed by a colleague who knows and believes that math is all around us. This collaborative project is a chance for students to explore, notice, and dicuss the importance of math in our lives and the lives around us. Using technological formats, we will interact with other students around the nation to see how they perceive the importance of math and where they see it significant in their lives.

Reading Connection 2008

Welcome to the Reading Connection space! We will use this space to share and post our text and multimedia book reviews so that everyone can enjoy them! We will start out using [|VoiceThread] to create our multimedia reviews, but are open to using different tools as the year progresses and new tools are developed.This space is designed to help students help other students find great books based on their reading interests. Our goal is to connect students from around the world to promote a love of reading.

The main purpose of this online space is to provide a place for students and teachers to share multimedia reviews of great books, to broaden reading for all students, and to connect and converse about books. Because reviews of a wide variety of books will be published here, students will be able to expand their reading horizons and meet other like-minded readers around the world. Teachers will benefit as well by establishing relationships with teachers around the world and by gleaning project ideas from these online colleagues. All people involved will also hone their technological and collaborative skills by working with multimedia tools like [|VoiceThread] and collaborating in this wiki environment.

<span style="color: rgb(224, 16, 16); font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"><span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Science, Social Studies and Math Explorations
<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">[|The Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education] <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">has designed many interactive and collaborative projects for students K-12 in the areas of science education. As an extension to our curriculum, we will explore data collection and the scientific process while working on real life problems associated with our world today. Please explore the following link to experiences some of the opportuniteis we look forward to participating in.