Activity 3 - Project Proposal Responses

Feeback for Kristin Zage on the Millenium Museum Project

I think your project is a really great one for gifted students.  It has the elements of not only asking the kids to do work with something related to current events, but is a wonderful tool for learning history and in addition will help them with basic research skills.  I think it is great you are addressing the issue of what makes a good source on the Internet.  The team approach makes a lot of sense because you’re dealing with some younger kids, many of whom may not have been exposed to these technologies.  I also thought the fact that their projects would be published on the web is a nice way to get parents involved in knowing what the kids are learning.  This is very positive.

What kinds of issues will you have with posting information on your school’s server?  Does the school generally make space available to teachers for classroom projects?  As a technology manager, I’d be curious to know how much planning your school district does to anticipate need for these types of resources.

Feedback for Cynthia Clark and Mike Sennert on Web Page Design Project for 7^th and 8^th graders

I think you have done a good job of pairing down this project to something manageable.  Some of the other projects I looked at were too ambitious for a school year.  I thought you questions about limited use of computers were really on-target, and I immediately thought of storyboarding as one activity the students could work on at a desk.  One idea that springs to mind is whether or not students might be allowed to create a web page for a business and ask the business to make a donation of computer equipment to the school district.  I’m not sure about the types of regulations regarding this and of course you would want to follow those…but I think sometimes limited resources make us a bit more entrepreneurial!  Another idea for the topic is some types of non-profit organizations that need to generate information, like a hunger pantry or something of that nature.  If kids are in any type of service organizations like scouts, this might be a wonderful project for them.

 I think one big challenge is evaluating who has contributed to a group project (i.e. who has done which parts of the final product).  And scheduling progress might be a concern.   Will you set benchmarks for them to have done certain things by certain dates, or will there just be a final date when the project is due?