Welcome to Global Lab (teacher)

Activity-at-a-Glance

Global Lab begins with community-building. This activity introduces students to Global Lab as a community of students dedicated to shared scientific inquiry. They will tell the community about themselves by submitting brief descriptions of their class and school.

Classroom Management and Preparation

You will need at least one computer with Internet access. You will need to have filled out a registration form. it is ideal if you can project the computer display overhead so the whole class can participate in developing the joint Hello message.

Materials

Digital camera

Internet connection

Recommended Steps

This very first activity of the curriculum welcomes students into the Global Lab community, which is composed of teachers and students all over the world. Together they will learn about local, regional, and global environments, and what they need to be healthy. Since they cannot study the Earth in a laboratory or a test tube, they will study a small piece of Earth called the study site. Like scientists and professionals, Global Lab students will share and compare findings made by careful study of the soil, water, air and biological characteristics of their study sites.

The essential components of the curriculum that students will experience include tools, telecommunications, curriculum, and the community of students and teachers. Global Lab is a community of like-minded peers - in this case, students - who are engaged in common purposes. Professionals like doctors, teachers, and scientists have similar sorts of communities of practice so they can learn from and build on each other's work.

In much the same way, our Global Lab community is first and foremost a learning community where colleagues benefit from the diversity of talents and viewpoints. Students use authentic scientific instruments - for example, a light meter - to measure key environmental parameters. They use these tools in the context of investigations that they will design and carry out. They then use the Internet to share their findings with other Global Lab classes.

A Hello message, or introductory set of annotated pictures, will personalize the Global Lab experience. By allowing for self-expression, they increase students' sense of ownership of and responsibility to the community and further enhance collaborative investigations.

If they are using the GL collaborative web site, show students their first web page of the series of pages that will include descriptions of their class, school and immediate surroundings and any features that make them unique. Also show them the registration data that relate to their environment.

They might like to look at sample submissions from other classes.

1. Allow the students to sit and think quietly for five minutes about how they would like their class, school, and surrounding to be introduced to the larger community of schools. Have them write down their main ideas. They can be both serious and lively, as the point is to establish a connection with other students.
2. Collect the ideas into a list. Ask the students to help you place them into school, class and surrounding categories.
3. Write out one or two very very brief paragraphs about each category (school, class, region) You can either assign this task to writer teams, to a student, or you might do it yourself as students suggest ideas).
4. Collect a few early pictures with a digital camera for this registration. You may do this yourself, or you may engage students in this process during class. If you don't have time, you may choose to wait until the Documenting Your Study Site activity to collect pictures.

Wherever you can, translate your message into another language.

When you have pictures ready to enter, try to reshape the paragraphs as annotations for the pictures. Save the longer expositions for sharing with other individual schools with whom you may strike up a special relationship.

If possible, go to http://globallab.concord.org/, Sharing and enter pictures and annotations. If it is not running at that time, you may share with another class or project.

As messages arrive, you may want to print and post the messages, as well as read them to the class.