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.