Getting ready to Collaborate

Jeanne and I are getting ready to plunge into the world of collaboration. We have set up a wiki and are going to have our students do some work on Proportional Problem Solving and currency. We were originally going to use wikispaces but it was blocked at her school. We had the space all ready to go and wham it was unusable. Pbwiki was unblocked and is going to be the site for this project.

I have used pbwiki in the past to showcase the growing posts that my students have created. It was a site that required you to do lots of hand coding and did not look as nice as wikispaces. The new user interface at pbwiki is similar to wikispaces making pbwiki easier to use now. I think I will continue to use both sites. Both have there benefits and drawbacks. I'll write another post telling all about how the student interaction went.

On to the project.

We called the project Alatoba because the first two syllables were from Alabama and the last two syllables were from Manitoba.
Talking Currency Conversion

If the project goes as planned the students will be placed into eight groups. Each group will be in charge of aspect of everyday life. Examples are food, electronics etc.

Students first must find items of interest that can be bought locally and get or take a picture of them. The need to know the price of the item they have selected. The students will then use simple math proportional reasoning to convert the object to the other countries currency. This math work will be done in paint or another drawing program. Each group then will have 4 pictures and math conversions or each of the topics.
The groups will then upload these images to bubbleshare and create a group presentation. Each presentation will be uploaded to the wiki and tagged alatoba. by the end of this part of the project there will be a minimum of 4 bubbleshare presentations from Canada and a similar set of bubbleshare presentations from Alabama.

On to phase 2.

In phase 2 the students will chose one of the other countries bubbleshare presentations and see if they can find the identical object in their home town. Once found the students will create a second bubbleshare presentation showing the price difference between the countries. A third slide for each product will be added to the presentation showing the best place to buy the products being compared.


Students will collaborate and be in contact with each other using skype and the discussion boards on the wiki. This is a small first step. If it goes well we will try more projects. There are two more up at Alatoba. The sky is the limit. Jeanne is an awesome person to work with. I hope you all can find a similar person to create projects with.