A Collaborative, On-going Writing Project

In my last post I briefly mentioned a collaborative project that my Global Studies students are working on. As promised, here's the follow-up to that post.

Last week marked the start of a new semester at my school. For me that meant the start of a new Global Studies course that I'm really excited about guiding my students through. (I refrained from saying "teaching" because as this course focuses on current events around the globe, we're learning together). Just as the new semester began, almost as if on que, the demonstrations began in Egypt. So I developed the first project of the semester around studying what is happening in Egypt.

The Project
The first project of the new semester is to work in groups of four to create an interactive booklet about Egypt. My students are using Google Docs Presentation to create their booklets. We're using Google Docs Presentation because it offers the option to embed videos which isn't an option if you're just making a standard document in Google Docs. All of the students in each group are collaborators on the project. I'm also a collaborator on each project so that I can see what they're doing and suggest edits as needed. Students are using text, images, and videos to tell the story of what is happening in Egypt right now.

Each group is responsible for including in their projects; background information about Egypt's history from the 20th Century through today, cultural information, details on the causes of the current demonstrations, and global responses to the current events. The students also have to form predictions as to what will happen over the next few weeks. The great thing about this project is that predictions will continue to change as more events unfold and more information becomes available. When we're done, I'll be sure to link the projects to this post.