At the Education Deptartment in the cultural organization where I work, we have two new projects that are strongly related to education and technology. The first is our website , About Japan (http://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/), which has lesson plans, essays, photos and videos about Japan for K-12 educators. Although the website was founded in 2007, we are starting a new initiative to increase the amount and variety of resources available. I am interested to learn how websites like this are used by teachers, what types of resources are most useful, and perhaps ways to make the website itself more accessible.
Secondly, just this week we launched the pilot of a social networking system connecting students in Connecticut and Tokyo. In September, we will add additional schools from throughout the US, Japan and Pakistan. The platform will allow students to work collaboratively on creative projects. In the pilot, for example, we have asked the students exchange information with their peers overseas and in order to create a wiki about "a day in the life" of a teen in the other country. We hope to create a framework in which the choice of projects gradually will become more student-directed so that students can, as Baird suggests, "take a more active role in their own learning process." Although we currently are only working with middle and high school students, I believe the readings, discussions and presentations from this class will be relevant and will help to make the network more successful.
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