Activity Two for: EstablishingTrust

Monitoring Global Seasonal Changes at All Grade Levels

Goals:

· To introduce students to the collection, compilation and analysis of weather data.

· To assist students with the publication of local weather data, that can be accessed by a global electronic community through the creation of a worldwide webpage.

Objectives:

· In this activity student groups will collect, analyze, compare, and present data about seasonal changes in their area of the world.

· Student groups will compare how the seasons differ in other places around the world.

· The student groups will present their data in an organized and coherent fashion on the web site.

Description:

· Student groups will represent the changes in our environment for each of the seasons. Depending on the age of the students, this can be done using drawings, a digital camera, possibly a video camera, and personal observations.

· Students will write and record narrative descriptions that will accompany their seasonal photojournals. These voicethreads, along with the original pictures will be placed on the voicethread web page (www.voicethread.com).

· Using the internet and email, the students will collect information from people in other parts of the world. This information will include written descriptions and pictures of the seasonal changes in their areas. For the younger grades the teacher, or perhaps parents, would post the emails. Family and friends are a great resource for this part of the project. Additionally, there are also a variety of web cams around the world that can be accessed for this information. One interesting modification is to have allof the electronic sources take a picture on the same day. This “world weather snapshot ” can be used to dramatically illustrate how the seasons differ around the world.

· Students will analyze the digital photos, comparing and contrasting the seasonal changes in different parts of the world. Other classes or schools could be invited to do the same. Seasonal photo comparisons could be expanded to include additional weather variables including temperature, humidity, precipitation, etc.

· A virtual field trip is the culminating activity for this project. Student groups select different geographic regions of the world to visit. A traveler’s electronic slideshow presented to the other student groups serves to highlight the relationship between geographic location and predictable weather patterns, predictable seasonal weather changes.

· A webpage/website dedicated for questions and answers can also be added at this point. Any time you put up this type of data, questions arise. Climate experts can be queried to help provide answers to those questions that may be too technical. The students can also be responsible for answering or finding the right person or web site to answer the questions posed on the web.

Assessment:

· Each student will complete the on-line group evaluation rating rubric, which encourages each student to honestly compare their efforts/contributions to those of their group members. The individual on-line rubrics will post ONLY to the instructor of the course.

· Additionally, each group will compare their on-line product to the other class on-line projects. Each groupwill then complete the electronic project rating rubric, established by all participants at the beginning of the activity.