Water Pollution in Brazil and California:
A Collaborative, Interdisciplinary Study
| 6. Project's Activities |
|
a) Students activities.
This cooperative project will allow students to:
Do practical field work,collect materials, observe , and take photos
Search, analyze and interpret books, scientific documents,papers, newspapers,
maps, graphs, photos, Internet, CD-ROM, speciality magazines, movies, and
art work with different languages as multimedia and performance. For example:
- Interview: on-line
or in presence with experts, politicians and the average person
- Laboratory work.
- Exchange data
and graphic information to combine, compare and summarize
-The experiments.
- Interactive art
through Internet and multimedia software.
- Texts, graphics,
photos about the knowledge acquired.
- Integration of
reason, feeling and aesthetics.
- Visits to the
museums, parks, libraries and other (outside of school) science laboratory
stations
- Public schools
that are involve in similar activities
-The exchange of
multimedia projects
b) Instructional Aids:
In our project we will plan to use:
*Computers (PC and Macintosh)
*Scanners
*Books,
*Magazines,
*Online and real "in class" interviews
*Digital cameras
*National Geographic Kids Network Water unit and Jason IX Project (Oceans and Beyond) for Edenvale Students
*Video Camera
*Shared project web site
c) Activity Profile ( Where will most of the activities take
place?)
Brazilian students
will develop their activities in the classroom and art classroom( approximately
30%); 20% in the chemical and physics laboratory; 20% computer laboratory;
30% outdoors ( in the field). The places will be: School Idalina and it
laboratories and it library), community near the school ( Sao Caetano do
Sul and Sao Paulo), University of Sao Paulo (libraries of the department
of Chemistry, Biology, Art and History , the multimedia centers ( NICA and
CCE), the"School of the Future", document centers as ITAU Cultural,
Museums, center of the water provisions and the water treatment, dam.
American students
will develop their activities at Edenvale School in the multimedia center
and library and through field trips to local creeks and possibly either
to the San Francisco Bay or Monterey Bay. Edenvale students will travel
to NASA/Ames in Mountain View, California in March for a satellite (real
time) telecommunication with Dr. Robert Ballard and research scientists
in Monterey Bay, Bermuda and the East Pacific Rim.
The two groups students
will get acquainted during the fall of 1997. They will share photographs,
and text files via email sharing personal histories, events that are involved
with water that they have been involved with, poetry, video and multimedia
exchanges.
Brazilian students
will have already been introduced to an actual laboratory's technical tools
to analyze the pollution of the water through theory , practice, on line
activities in-class presentations,interviews with experts and research on
the Internet, and in books and magazines.
Brazilian students
will collect water from different places to analyze it.
Brazilian students
will research past Brazilian artists who painted or wrote about water to
discover how they spoke about or represented water.
Brazilian students
will learn and explore a software multimedia and create a page in their
school home page with the Edenvale students
Brazilian students
will study the multimedia of Brazilian artists that involve art, science
and ecology. They will learn the techniques and ideas of these artists,
and will produce their own collaborative artistic works.
Brazilian students
will ask local politicians about the causes and solutions to the problem
of water pollution.
Brazilian students
will research the past history of the rivers of the their region, will learn
how these rivers are today, and how and why their ecology has changed.
Brazilian students
will map their rivers and problems.
Brazilian students
will compare and summarize their works with Edenvale students and with each
other. They will exchange data, and plans for
Brazilian students
will search for solutions to their regional water pollution. They will look
for ways to assist in their in local region and divulge their work.
American students
will trace their local history from the pre Colombian history to the present,
focusing on how each group of immigrants and settles changed the environment
and how those changes affected the watershed..
American students
will participate in the National Geographic Kids Network water units from
March through May, 1998 using their National Geographic Kids Network experiments
and research results to study the water shed in our area. They will share
results their experiments with our Brazilian research team.
American students
will participate in the Jason IX Project (Oceans of the Earth and Beyond)
in February and March. In this project they will study the environments
in Monterey Bay, Bermuda and the Guyamas Basin in the East Pacific Rim.
Data from this project will be shared with the Brazilian students.
Brazilian and American
students will study the work of environmentalists and artists to discover
the relationship between art, conservationist and the environment. They
will share a multimedia representation of their research with each other.
Brazilian and American
students will study local myths and legends in our cultures and relate their
importance to environmental issues such as water pollution.
Brazilian and American
students will work in collaborative teams to create common solutions to
joint problems of water pollution.
Brazilian and American
students will begin collaboration on the the actual project in March 1998.
The American students will end their school year in June, 1998. Consequently
they will complete the major portion of their collaboration by then. The
American teacher will continue the collaboration during the summer with
any students who can remained involved. In Sept. 1998 when the American
students return to school, they will finish the sharing and posting of results.
d) What are the main innovative
features of your project?
This project involves a multidisciplinary, multicultural, multimedia collaboration between schools in two different countries who are collaboratively developing new learning and teaching methods through the integration of the Internet into the educational environment as way to solve social and ecological problems.
