Global Communities

Ms. S is a middle school social studies teacher in Argentina whose class studies the characteristics of communities. In the past she has used the textbook, but has found that the students are not terribly engaged. She also finds that the information in the text is dated, somewhat shallow, and focuses only on communities in her nation. She is hoping to give her students a more global perspective.

Using the Web resource GlobalSchoolNet, Ms. S establishes a relationship with teachers with like teaching assignments, at a Spanish immersion school in the United States, and at a school in Spain. Students in each of the classrooms speak Spanish, so this language will be the common language for the project. Each of the schools has access to multiple technologies: laptops are available at each site, as well as a variety of smart phones and tablets.

Using the messaging tool Fring, the three teachers refine the design of the project together. They ask students to work together in multi-site teams to create an online presentation comparing three key characteristics of communities: social, demographic, and economic. Students will create two versions of the online presentation, using the tool Prezi. The first version will be a standard Prezi presentation for presenting in real time. The second will be a voice-over version for display on the Web.

To start the unit, the teachers set up a three-way Skype between the three classrooms to introduce the project. The decision is made to conduct all three-way communications at 12 PM GMT. This would equate to 8 AM in the States, 9 AM in Argentina and 2 PM in Spain. Students are introduced to each other and assigned to teams of six, two students at each school. Much of the communication for the project takes place asynchronously, through email. All writing the students do is hosted in a shared document in Google Docs.

Students begin by listing the elements of community on which to focus in the three categories of social, demographic, and economic characteristics. They quickly discover interesting contrasts between the communities in jobs, architecture, diversity in ethnicity, and more. The availability of smart phones and tablets allows the students to explore their communities: after school or on the weekends, they travel around their community and collect sounds, images, and interview snippets to include in the final presentations. One of the teams discovers a team facilitation site, named Teambox, which integrates with Dropbox to allow for shared calendars, file storage, and more. Soon most of the other teams adopt the tool as well. They download these sounds, images and interviews to their laptops as they create their final presentations.

The final presentations to each other are made at 12 PM GMT via Skype, with team members alternating during the presentation. The voice-over version is created in six sections, allowing each team member to contribute. The final sound file for that version is stitched together on classroom laptops using the free audio tool Audacity. The presentation is posted on a custom Website created in Google Sites, and the URL is distributed to other schools via GlobalSchoolNet.

Resources used in this scenario:

Tools used in this scenario: