When our
three schools enrolled in
GVC,
for Mexico
it was the third time, second for Japan
and the first for the
USA.
Being October our first month, we started
sharing our school schedules and holidays to coordinate joint work.
Students and teachers communicated via Nicenet through mails and
forums. Each student created a personal webpage to introduce himself/herself
to all the team.
Graphic
by: Mauricio Mojica (M)
USA,
Japan
and Mexico
teachers started communicating through
Talking Communities several
times a week. Teacher assistants were selected in each country
to help our instructructors. During an audio conference throughTalking
Communities, students from Usa,
Japan and
Mexico introduced
themselves and discussed our topic possibilities. After voting,
"Global Issues"
was selected. We decided to have a "Virtual
Kick-Off Party"to celebrate the launching
of our project. Since our topic had many possibilities for subtopics,
students created a web of ideas.
(M)
(U)
(M)
(J)
(M)
November:
After two
months working together and our project looking brilliant, we decided
to have our "Kick-off
party"
on November 10th. It was difficult to coordinate it due to the different
time zones. Mexico
and USA
had it at 4:30 PM, while Japan
had it at 7:30 AM of the next day.
With
the use of MSN Messenger and iVisit, Mexico,
USA and Japan
students celebrated the beginning of our project. Students had a great
time; they learned about each other and about each other's country.
Each answered some questions that each country posted on their introducing
website.
We
cut a cake in each country at the same time as a sort of ritual for
good luck. Since we were informed that all images used on our site
had to be original or used with a written permission, our artists
were motivated to show us what they can do with their creativity and
imagination.
New
topics were opened in Nicenet for students to input ideas for the
story line. Ideas for the presentation, design, and graphics for our
project started to become constant. Subtopics were chosen. A table
with the subtopics that each student would be working on was posted.
Some students decided to be web and flash designers, while others
worked on content. Designers started working on the characters that
appeared on our presentation. Directories for each country were created
on our web space so that students could start uploading their contents
and designs. Teachers continued communicating through Talking Communities.
December:
On December
we communicated through talking comunities (Nicenet mainly). Almost
all of the USA
students decided what they would do for their
pages and were in the processes of investigation and
development. Japan had
a holiday and afterwards the students had their semestral exam. For
this reason, we still had to work on their roles of the development
of our site.
We
had a meeting on December 14th through talking communities and they
promised to post this information so that we could update our rasi.
Here
are some pictures of the Japan Team.
Some
Mexico students
were working on their investigations,others were working on flash
introductions for each subtopic, and on the layout or our mainpage.
There was a great collaboration from everyone on our meetings
through nicenet. USA students
who spoke japanese
helped us communicate with Japan,
now everyone knew what was expected from each one of us and we were
heading towards the same goal.
(This is an example of Nicenet, our main
talking comunity.)
Mexico
GVC Team
V
Technology Symposium
January:
In January we were in
the process of developing contents,we
had designers creating graphics and flash presentations for the subtopics.
Our webmasters traced
a diagram for our websites.
We resumed classes on
January 9th and USA
went into semestral exams. During this month
students
were updating their comments on Nicenet and discussing what everyone
had
done and should start doing.
These
weeks were kind of slow because of the activities in the three schools.
On January the 20th the American Institute of Monterrey had their
V Technology Simposium: Students Creating Global AwarenessThrough
Technology. In the Keynote conference the Mexican
students talked about their experiences
in the project. Japan and
USA students sent
a video introducing themselves
and telling their experiences in GVC.
At the end of January, our next conference date was set, February
8, 2006.
February:
February
we start to close our project. Japan
ended school in this month. It also meant,
"Get to work!" we
were in the processes of linking our pages and checking each one
of them carefully. We were still recievieving some graphics and
contents from the three countries. Throughout all this time we
had been communicating through talking comunities, (*nicenet*
mail, ftp and MSN messenger). At that time we had 45 HTMLS in
which students of the three countries had been working on. We
were planning on having all the project set up on February the
28th, the day
Japan ended
school.
Mexico
and USA
continued working on corrections untill
the due date. We had a lot of work on those days, putting everything
together and creating the map of our site. Everyone, however,
was empowered to do their best.
February
2nd - an article of our Global International project appeared
in the "Dallas Morning News".
This interview was made for the Dawson Middle School from Texas,
one of our collaborative partners.
(M)
(J)
(M)
(J)
(U)
(U)
Audrey Del Rosario (U)
We
had been notified by Teacher Julie Presley that our
USA
student leader Audrey is sick and that Devon will
take her place for this last part. We decided to make an html for this
student on our page because of her hard work as a leader. We are posting
get well animated cards on this page. We are all praying so that doctors
can find the cure for
her illness.
(M) (M)
(J)(J)
(U)(U)
March:
We
assembled all the pages in the web site, adding the backgrounds made
for each one of them.
We
did our presentation in the format of a newspaper which is called
“It's a Small World". The introduction to our project is written by
the three principles of our schools.
Students
from
Japan have ended
their course but they got together once a week for to give us feedback
and send us their files. USA and
Mexico were still
in class so they communicated in a daily basis in the integration
and feedback of the website.
We
ask our schools during the last week to evaluate our site in order
to be sure that everything was in order.
As
you can see, students, teachers, and even our principals were very
motivated on the conclusion of our project!
(M) 
(U)
(M)
(J)
(M)
(M)
(J)
(M)
(J)
(U)
(U)
(M) 
(M)
(J)
(J)
(U)
(U)
