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Master teacher, Germaine, arrives at school and begins by checking mail. She has 6 text messages, 3 verbal and 2 multi-media messages. She listens to the verbal message from a partner teacher in Egypt and downloads the multi-media presentation from his students. Germaine forwards it to the class so it will be waiting for them in their portable units. She then reviews the status of student work. She checks how many of her students assess themselves as ahead or behind schedule in their projects and how many have asked for guidance. She clicks on these students to schedule personal conferences. She reviews the mentor conferences. Student groups have regular conferences with experts who help direct their project work. At the end of each conference, mentors reply to a few short questions and their answers are automatically loaded to a database and stored in graphic format with other assessments. Germaine loads the mini-pic graphs of her whole class. She rearranges them to look at them by gender and then by academic group. She clicks on some individual students and they are added to the schedule of personal conferences. Their project topics are sent to "knowbots" who scan registers to find mentors who might be able to offer some help to these students.
The students arrive and take their notebooks out of the charging units and check their daily schedule and mail. The program from Egypt opens first because of the priority assigned to by their teacher. Everyone is excited to see the student presentation as this is the first visual contact with Egypt.
"Look we must be moving on a camel, oh there is Giza."The students follow the links suggested by their partners in Egypt to The Great Pyramid and its message for Earth. They knew that The Great Pyramid is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that is still standing. They are surprised, however, to learn that Joseph Seiss and others find that the Pyramid lies in the center of gravity of the continents and in the exact center of all the land area of the world, dividing the earth's land mass into approximately equal quarters. They never thought of dividing up the world as was shown in these maps.
"Click on that wall and look at this!"
"Hey look, that must be Kaffe wearing the Bruins hat we sent."
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Comments?
Margaret Riel (mriel@iearn.org).