The Geo-Literacy
Global Project is a real world approach to
learning. Students collaborate with the community agencies, museums,
historical societies, to ask "essential
questions," provide online virtual tours, historical, scientific, and
ecological information about sites within their community.
Examine your state curriculum
standards. You will quickly find that this project aligns with language
arts, social science, science and geography standards both nationally and
within most state standards. Example: The Geo-Literacy Project firmly
aligned with the California Language Arts, Science, Social Science and ISTE
technolgy standards. Informational text reading, writing in different
genres, the 6 Traits of Writing as well as the Writing Process naturally fit
into the project. It also fit in perfectly with the 3rd grade local history
and ecology standards as well as the 6th grade geography, topography, and
geology standards. As part of our program we have added a cultures
model to study how the ecological and geographical impact our socio-cultural
model.
Location is everything in the Geo-Literacy
Project. When looking at your own county or region, try to focus on a small
area or specific location within the county. Keep the project focused and
clear for the students, community and the Internet community visiting your
site.
We chose to focus on Rush Ranch because it was in our county, was a
historical location, was run by local historians and scientists, and sat on
the Suisun Marsh. By looking at Rush Ranch I found that it wove in Language
Arts, Science, History and Geography standards into one project while
keeping the project focused.
If participating class in Solano County only choose one location each, over
the next year we will have quite a few of the areas of Solano County covered
in depth!
Students
brainstorm important sites, things of value in their communities to come up
with an "essential question." Next students seeks a variety of
information from primary sources. The evaluate the resources and
discuss sources of information. Next they brainstorm who their
audience will be and what resources they will need to develop their project.
Your project can utilize as much or as little of the technical products we
used. We went to our community and found many volunteers willing to discuss
topics the children were interested in.
We
invited a variety of speakers and specialists to visit our classroom and
share their knowledge.
With help and brainstorming children created a website to
present to the community all they had learned. Below 3rd graders made
this object rotation. Object rotations are exactly what they sound
like; an object that can be virtually rotated by a clicked mouse.
It is easily photographed by a basic camera and inexpensive software.
You can see more about the hardware and training on the
equipment page.
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