Online Projects and Classroom Collaborations

One of the most important and compelling ways to use the Internet as a tool to enhance classroom learning in all subjects is the use of ongoing projects and collaborations to link kids around the world by providing them with meaningful tasks to accomplish. Teachers can propose their own projects or choose to join one of the myriad of varied and fascinating ideas already under way. 

Your class can join students and teachers from over 4000 schools in over 60 countries who are working with research scientists to learn more about our planet in the GLOBE project. Or you can join the Global Grocery List, a long standing project that generates real, peer collected data for use in various subject areas for computation, analysis, and conclusion-building. The links found here point the way to these and many other examples of ways students become empowered and begin to see themselves as members of a global community that affects them and upon which they can have an impact. 

Many projects require you to sign up and are time-sensitive, so please note deadlines. If you join or design a project as a result of visiting this web page, we would like to hear about it. Please contact us at the Teacher Center. 

Collaborative Projects Annotated links collected and published by Janne Mathes, Staff Development for Technology and Computer Coordinator at Schalmont Central Schools, and a Greater Capital Region Teacher Center constituent.

Join an Online Project All the projects you could possibly imagine with useful summaries and listed in alphabetical order. This is a highly recommended resource and an example of a super school site - one of the web pages created by the Loogootee Elementary School in Loogootee, Indiana!

NASA Classroom of the Future This program, administered by Wheeling Jesuit University, serves as NASA's premier research and development center to develop technology-based tools and resources for K-12 schools. They develop CD-ROMS and Internet-based projects that use NASA's remote sensing databases to engage students by presenting them with problems currently being investigated by practicing scientists. Projects relevant for social studies classes and others are included.

Local teachers and students at Cairo-Durham have participated in this program and speak highly of it.

GLOBE Project This innovative K-12 program brings together a worldwide network of students, teachers, and scientists to study and understand the global environment. Students collect environmental data at or near their schools and report the data via the Internet to GLOBE scientists who use the data in their research and create images from the data sets. The students are then able to visualize their own environmental observations. Among the benefits of this program are the feeling of empowerment students feel as their data is seriously examined, the training students receive in the collection of data according to scientific protocols, and the increased sense they gain of global, environmental linkages.

An information workshop that will answer questions about how GLOBE is organized, how teachers and students are trained, and how local educators can join the project, is planned at the Capital Region BOCES. An opportunity for local training is planned for summer 2000. Contact the Teacher Center with questions or call Laura Lehtonen, BOCES School Support Services, 518-786-3277.