A Teacher’s Thoughts

After having seen some great examples of student collaborative projects such as those by Kim Cofino, Clarence Fisher, Chris Craft, The Horizons Project, and the Flat Classroom Project, I am inspired to give it a try. My goals are simple, facilitate a collaborative project with one or more other classrooms that addresses key learning targets in my curriculum.
I would like to extend an official invitation to join my class (grade 8 ) and I on a product design collaboration. I have posted the beginnings of my ideas on the distance collaborations forum at classroom 2.0. I am hoping the collaboration will begin with a cooperating teacher in designing the project together. Below are my rough ideas so far, but I am certainly open to others:

I saw a post by Mr. Zehring about a simple product design assignment using straws. The basic idea was to build something and illustrate a science principle. So, taking off on that I envision:

• teams will design and create a product that does something (defined as work) out of straws (or popcycle sticks, or toothpicks, or ???)
• Each team consists of two halves, half from my room, half from somewhere else (that is you!)
• The product must be built as two pieces, neither piece will work without the other and cannot simply be replicas of each other.
• Each team constructs half the product while collaborating on the whole product (lots of communication, measuring, planning, teamwork…here)
• Each team builds two exact replicas of their part of the product, sending one replica to the other half of the team for final assembly
• Teams now put the products together in the final phase-should be seamless if well designed.
• Videos or slides of the products doing “their thing” are uploaded to a central site.
• Reflections are made
• Celebrations are had!

I don’t know where this will lead but hopefully to some great collaborative, investigative learning! Given that this hasn’t been fully developed yet and I have a student teacher later this fall, I would expect to run this sometime this winter.
If you would like to join me please send me a message through the contact page on this site.