Back in January, I saw a projected in a Google Community about Virtual Valentines. I read the information and thought it sounded like something fun and educational to do with my students. So, I signed up and was assigned a class from Round Rock, Texas. The guidelines were to find the distance from city to city in kilometers and make any connections you wanted. So off we went to discover!
We got the iPads busy learning some basic ways to search for information on the Internet. Then we organized the information we found and picked the important things we wanted to share. We looked for connections we could make. Our 2nd grade Social Studies curriculum is all based on communities. What better way to share what we know about where we live, than to tell someone who doesn't live here! The question became... How is Round Rock like Bellevue and how is it different? We also just learned about landforms in social studies, so we found the features of Round Rock. We used Google Earth to look at the land and to get a real picture of how Round Rock looks. My students noticed that many of the houses had swimming pools in the backyards. We then had a discussion about how the weather is different from place to place. Each day we searched for information brought about new discussions. My students were engaged, motivated and enthusiastic about learning!
The last part of the project was to share about your city and what you learned with your partner class. We used our Notes on the iPad and wrote down what we were going to say. Then used the camera to video our information and found some pictures using Google Images. Last, we put all the videos together in iMovie and have a finished project to share.
I would definitely do a project like this again. We incorporated reading, writing, math, social studies and technology all together. And it was fun!
