Subject: Geography
Grade Level: 3rd
Goals: Student will be able to identify the 7 continent. Student will be able to discuss the school and family life of people found on the continents. Student will be able to share their culture with others through a class website

Teaching Outline:
1: Discuss maps and continent
2: Discuss the life style, focus on school and family, of each continents
3: Discuss pen-pals and setting up a class website.
4: Prep for tomorrow, ideas, plans for class website
5: Field Trip/guest speaker about website.
6: Create Website
7: Connect with other School Websites, focus on finding international schools and/or foreign
schools (with English)
8: Set kids up with email-pals.
9: Continue to update website and contact by email

Management and Challenges:

It will be hard to keep everyone engaged in one big class project and if they’re not engaged the management problems increase. One way to deal with this is by breaking the website into chunks that the kids can work on in small groups of four or five people. For example, possible groupings are an introduction page, school life page, family life page, our favorite things page. By giving the groups individual pages to work they each have individual responsibilities within the larger single project of creating a website.

Benefits of the Technology:

I choose this project because it gave the students a way to connect with an abstract concept, continent and maps, with concepts that they are familiar with, school and their family. I also wanted it to be a genuine experience. We will study the different cultures in books but will use technology to widen our experience to people we can interact with (through the internet). By providing children with the opportunity to talk with children living in the culture they can gain a first hand perspective they couldn’t in books.