DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A RURAL AND URBAN LIVES

FOR 3-4th GRADERS

The theme of this video conference was "the more things are the same in our lives the more they are different." Kids of the same age are different based on their

surroundings.

Project time frame

An urban school in NYC, a

rural school in upstate NY, and a surban school outside San Antonio. Tx.

This project was the result of a list serve offering from CILCI. We each

spend a month of e mailing each other to decide what the format was

going to include. We decided that we would submit 10 questions to each

other about the urban, surban and rural environment we lived in. The

common themes were to include

1. weather

2. transportation

3. a day in the life… school day

4. cultural influences

5. entertainment activities

Other

A graphic organizer was developed by me to document each schools

presentation and was used by each school. The 3 different Venn like

graphic organizer displayed each child s understanding of a rural, urban

suburban environment

How to sign up

Three schools signed up for this project. The guidelines of a rural school were a

school under 100 kids. My school has 450 kids, so I had to negotiate us in to the project. Cilc list serve is open to anyone school who has made a general registration to the process.

IP or ISDN?

This project was proposed as an IP project, but with the Texas Bridge NYC came in as an ISDN. This created a lot of down time; because the voice activated visual location changes were not clean. In addition the NYC school did not mute their mike as they were told to do. There was an attempt to do split screens, which confused the viewer, until each location got used to this process.

Learner Outcomes

Distance learning was new to each school in each location, so I kept the learning curve very structured. The prepared 10 question were the benchmarks for each location. The script of the ten questions was diverted often when each location tried to explain in details what they wanted to highlight. (Example when the school in NYC said they had homework EACH weekend, I debate started between the kids and their teachers, as to the success of this process. The learners were to document the differences and similarities and difference of a rural, suburban and urban environment. This turned into a competition at one point, but I tried to refocus the different locations into an appreciation of each difference.

Methods and Activities

The use of a structured data driven

(graphic organizer) supported the documentation for each environment

(Urban, Rural and Surban)

Each class developed a post activity of 10 questions each to ask about the environmental and social. The only hands on activity were to take the data from the graphic organizers and to write a 100 word, compare and contract essay.

Materials

This activity was monitored by the teachers in each local; do to the child sage group. This format was based on a "Sixty Minute theme", with each location responded to pre developed common question theme. Given the ages of the children, and the fact this was a first time experience in video conferencing … no outside visuals were used.

Videoconference Details.

Time: It's probably best to keep this close to one class period. Given the age of the kids, this was scheduled for a 1 hour. It turned out to be 45 minutes, when the kids became restless.

Responsibilities: The

student would develop an agreed common response (group response) to each

question. This was not as successful as I would have like based to

reaction to some questions. Teachers would often restate the question to

be answered to reinforce the kids understanding.

**Agenda: *Although the video conference format as new to each

location, I role played the VC ahead of time with my location ahead of

time, allowed my kids to be well prepared, and to stay on focus. Because

of logistics problems, the VC took place in my 5th grade classroom… so I

was babysitting 20 5th graders also during this event. (Something I

would never do again).

Feel free to include additional information required for state, national, or district lesson planning requirements.

This project was created by Steve Brooks as part of the Kid2Kid Videoconference Connections Online Class.