Tips and Advice for Projects and Collaboration
- Don't hesitate - it is always a good idea to do a project and collaborate.
- Go with it - but don't expect everything to go the way you planned it.
- Have reasonable pedagogical expectations - a project is a good way to reinforce a concept, but probably not a good way for students to learn new material.
- Modify as needed - the projects are meant to be adapted.
- Set aside appropriate time. Most of the projects take 1 - 3 days.
- Collaboration with another school takes patience. Be clear in your communications with other educators. Understand that we all operate under many constraints. Expect a collaborative project to take about 2 weeks from start to finish (even though the actual time on task will be much less).
- Use convenient web tools for collaboration. I highly recommend edmodo for a collaborative platform. Even if they have never used it, students will master it instantly. Google Docs is a good place to create shared documents. Geogebra is an excellent utility for graphing functions and data. All of these are free.