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Comment by Elizabeth Garrison on April 14, 2011 at 7:46pm

Anyone going to the Punahou Sustainability Fair? Kokua Hawaii Foundation invited our Green Club from St. Anthony School to attend as part of the Kokua Earth Action Project. Look for us if you are there!

 

Comment by Lance Cordell Boyd on February 20, 2011 at 5:59pm

A collaborative Singapore/Hawaii project has finally taken shape. Please have a read and let us know your thoughts and ideas.   

In a story that will sound familiar, implementation depended on finding a Singaporean teacher with the interest and willingness to invest the time and energy to give this a shot (this applies to "leaving exam rich" pre-tertiary schools, PBL is pedagogy 70% of tertiary students will encounter! I'll be connecting with them later on this month). We'll be co-teaching a Geography class (30 students, 14/15 yrs old, 19 girls 10 boys) that the curriculum (O level) requires students study weather, climate and climate change, and tourism. Considering the SE Asian exam driven school systems, we must cover this content yet capitalize on the uniqueness of this opportunity and the skill and knowledge of collaborators. So we started by asking this question:    

How can we cover O level Geography curriculum while facilitating a personalized, tech rich, collaborative learning opportunity about climate change, Hawaii, and the future? 

Our answer is an island to island collaborative, project-based opportunity for student teams to design a climate change resilient, eco-resort for a Hawaiian island in the near future. Teams will be assigned one of Hawaii's main islands for which they must design an adaptable, living structure that takes the island's geography and present as well as projected environmental challenges into account. Teams will use free design software Google Sketch-up then place their design on a site using Google Earth. The process will be documented on team blogs.

We are seeking student collaborators from Hawaii SOTF schools. We are open to suggestions regarding how students in Hawaii could contribute. HI students could form their own team and even design for Singapore. However, their knowledge of HI could be very valuable if they were to join a team and collaborate online. A less time intensive option includes using their knowledge of HI to judge/provide feedback on Singaporean entries.

In the next few weeks, we will launch our project by having students analyze the probable future impacts of climate change and the direction tourism took in Hawaii using the 4 alternative scenarios for Hawaii in 2050 published by the Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies at UH Manoa (http://hawaii2050.org/images/uploads/futures_scenarios.pdf). Students will be blogging analysis and reactions as a first step.  

Please let us know your thoughts and/or how your students would like to contribute.

Lance and Kah Mun

Comment by Maurice Valley on January 16, 2011 at 11:50pm

I am interested too. Please read my first blog entry.

Comment by Jane Raissle on July 28, 2010 at 3:12pm

We are in the very beginning stages of a year long project with our middle school students. We have only just begun the planning process due to the summer break but were able to establish a unifying theme for our work - sustainability. Once the teachers return next month, we will be working on defining our projects (each teacher will develop a project in an area of special interest/passion) and these in turn will be presented to our students as a menu of options. Small groups will form around these projects that (hopefully) channel their special interests into solid learning opportunities and unique projects. I am hoping we will have the students and teachers matched up by around mid October. We still have much to define in terms of the projects and culminating celebration of learning, but I will certainly pass your project idea along to the teachers I work with and see if someone would be interested in collaborating with you in some manner. Once I know the other topics and projects that have been selected for the year, I will be posting them here. I would love it if some happened to resonate with the plans of others in this group so we could exchange ideas and extend our reach. As you can tell this is a real work in progress - please let me know if you are interested in hearing more (or need further explanation!