Collaborative Projects

I have been thinking about what literary period to start a collaborative project between PPHS students and Farmington High School students.  I think I will propose a small-scale project over Franklin and his virtues to start us off.  Jenni and I are meeting next Wednesday to figure out our plans . . . maybe we can video chat with Josh, and the three of us can work it out.  If we decide to begin with Franklin, we could pair PPHS students up with FHS students and have them work on Google Docs to write a collaborative report and create a presentation with Google Presenter that can be presented to another group.  The project could be based on Franklin's virtues and the system he put into place to track his success/failures in following the virtues.  I then envision a more involved project for the Romanticism period.

Josh and I have also both created online journaling venues for our classes.  He used a a wiki format with PBWorks.  It is amazing that we both came up with pretty much the same idea without really discussing it.  I think we both may have mentioned online journaling in passing, but did not say anything more than that.  I did make my class blogs public whereas the FHS wiki is private (may be entered by invitation only).  My personal view is that the students will give more attention to the quality of their work in a public format, but I understand the concept of keeping work on a private level as well.  As I read through some of Josh's students' entries, I could see how tentative they were with the process.  There is a different mindset between regular and accelerated students - I may have had to do something different last year with the regular junior English class (i.e. ease them into the process)..