The purpose of Where in the World Are You? is to learn about different cultures around the world from people who really live there. The class as a whole answers about 15 questions about their climate, culture, and geography of their homeland. The teachers then submit their information and I create a quiz for all the participating classes. Then the quiz is sent to all the participating classes. Then the research begins! Each class has to research all the information about the different cultures. Later we see which classes found the most correct answers.
Where in the World Are You? was pretty sucessful through the July 2001 period. The participants did have a little difficulty doing the project. I had relatives of mine imitate teachers from different country. This came to be a problem because the purpose of the activity was to learn what other countries were like from the people that live there. Of course, my family that lives within a half hour of my house cannot properly say what it is like to live in other countries.
Another problem was finding all the information needed for the questions. This was an eye opener because this means classes are going to have difficulty as well -- but that may be a good thing to teach -- how do we find those difficult facts? That's a research skill. One of my participants went to an encyclopedia website and found all the information while the others tried other websites and found it took much more time. One thing I definitely need to improve is to find more good websites and list them so the teachers have an idea where to do research effectively.
One thing I would like to change is to have the classes develop questions to put on the quiz. I would definitely give them the information that needs to be worked with so the information is coming from the same ideas. This would make the workload for me more workable during the middle of the school year. This would also make the students own their own work more if each teacher involved them in creating the questions for their section of the quiz. This would make it more interesting for the students and teachers participating.
A challenge that I had was to get my submit information form to work properly. I am still working on getting the information to come through to my e-mail. This submittal form is still being worked on to get the information to me. Once this is working, I can change the submit form to have the classes that participate to make questions from this information instead of just giving me the facts.
I have learned so much with this project about web page organization and trying to be organized enough for other teachers to be comfortable getting themselves involved in the project. I also learned how to make forms to be submitted that actually work and how to create better web pages.
This project was really a great learning experience. I am looking forward to the fall/spring session to see how this project works with teachers across the world. If anyone would like to participate, let me know!