Theresa Gabor Contra Costa County Office of Education

 contracostaicn.pbworks.com contracostaicn.pbworks.com

 Engage 4 th -12 th grade students in an authentic project that supports language arts standards and integrates technology  Foster communication and collaboration between schools throughout our county  Support teachers learning to use and incorporate Web 2.0 tools

 Application Application  Participants Participants  Organization Organization  Getting to Know You Getting to Know You  Videoconference with a Journalist Videoconference with a Journalist  Researching and Writing Researching and Writing  Posting Articles Posting Articles  Creating the Newspapers Creating the Newspapers  Posting the Newspapers Posting the Newspapers  Sticking Points Sticking Points  Next Steps Next Steps

 Simple application with one key question Describe how you will implement the project. Include details regarding selecting topics for articles, identifying and/or assigning jobs for students, integration of technology, and how this project will address curriculum standards.  Those selected were awarded $2500 to purchase materials to support the project

 4 elementary schools Several used it as part of after school programs  1 middle school  2 high schools Both used it as part of a journalism program

 Created a wiki as the central location for information and activities  For many teachers and students this was the first time using a wiki

 Classes practiced online research to find at least 5 interesting facts about their school  Clues were posted on the wiki  Other classes used clues to guess the identity of the other schools  Suggested topics included Weather Local history Landmarks

 entary-Where-in-Contra-Costa-County- Clues entary-Where-in-Contra-Costa-County- Clues  le-and-High-School-Where-in-Contra- Costa-County-Clues le-and-High-School-Where-in-Contra- Costa-County-Clues

 The hardest part of the project Schools lacked the infrastructure to support it  Worked with a local journalist  Set expectations with students ahead of time  One conference with middle and high school, separate one for elementary  Used K-12 HSN

 10 articles required  5 required topics World News Local News Science Today Editorial People in the News (local personality)  Teachers decided how to get the articles written

 Created a wiki page for easy indexing of articleswiki page  Students posted their articles as Word documents so other schools could manipulate the text  Other schools selected articles to include in their own newspapers

 Classes chose articles from the collection to use in their site newspapers  They used desktop publishing software to create their own newspaper Word and Publisher were most popular

 Final newspapers were posted on the wiki as PDFs Final newspapers  Hard copies were also sent to each participating class

 Poor school infrastructure limited videoconference  Younger students not able to take full advantage of the videoconference  Finding a wiki not blocked by district filters  Trusting teachers to screen content- and maybe we shouldn’t

 Add more collaboration during the writing process via a wiki and/or Google Docs  Blog with a journalist and with each other about the journalistic process  Publishing the newspaper can be done on paper OR on a wiki  Option to publish more frequently

  contracostaicn.pbworks.com contracostaicn.pbworks.com  Online Evaluation