Searching for Teachers to Participate in an Interdisciplinary Project

[Thomas Cooper]

Hello,
I am the technology integration coordinator at the Walker School in Atlanta, GA. I am looking for secondary teachers who would be interested in having their students participate in an interdisciplinary project to construct a wiki site and layer in Google Earth on human migrations around the globe. Many of the characters in the books we will be reading for this project are between the ages of 12 and 21 and would therefore, I believe, appeal to high school students. One book you might be interested in is called "Factory Girls", which discusses the migration of Chinese youth from the provinces to the city to work in the factories in Southern China.

I already have interest from a US History teacher in Salt Lake City who will focus on the Mormon migration, an environmental teacher who has a number of migrant students and will focus on US/Central America immigration issues, an environmental science teacher who will focus on the Dust Bowl, a Latin teacher who is going to focus on the Roman migration around 476 AD, and an social studies teacher who will focus on post WWII European issues. I would like to find a couple of teachers in China who would be willing to look at "Factory Girls".

Schools that participate will receive free Google Earth Pro licensees in order to work on the project, under a grant I have with Google.

I would really love this to be a collaborative project between a group of teachers from various disciplines and various countries and their students. To this end, the specific details of the project are up for discussion, and I hope to schedule a number of opportunities for the student groups to communicate on Elluminate.

Here are the basic objectives of the project:

1. Class groups decide on what book(s) they want to research. Groups from different classes studying the same book will be matched with other groups and there will also be opportunity for students to learn about what others are studying.
2. Each group creates a short introductory video about a historical or contemporary migration they choose with a focus on one or more push / pull factors, such as culture, class, economics, labor, religion, race, etc.
3. Groups research and write in order to construct one or more pages on the wiki about their issues. Students will conduct peer reviews. This could either be done on the discussion tab in the wiki or we could create a social network for students and teachers to join.
4. Students can out source work to my graphic design, film and video, and web design course here in America. Or students have particular talents in these areas in other classes could also volunteer their services to other groups.
5. After the wiki is completed, students will use Google Earth Pro to construct a collaborative layer that shows the route of each migration and the push / pull factors that affected the migration.
6. Students who live in places where these migrations are currently taking place, such as in China, could be tasked with interviewing someone affected by the issue and sharing it with other classes on the wiki.
7. After the exams AP/IB students could write a paper addressing common themes among the migrations, and post them to the wiki.
8. If time permits, student could post suggestions on how governments could ameliorate migration issues that are happening today.
9. I would also like the students to get involved with raising funds to support an international charity that works with migrants.

If you would like more information on this project, you can:
1. Visit our wiki site for the project: Land of Hope: Explore the Factors that Affect Migration at: http://landofhope.wikispaces.com. The site is currently under construction, so please forgive our growth.
2. Contact me directly: my email is [e-mail] and my Skype ID is tcooper1966.