Project Overview

Watch the Where in Washington Project Video

Video Conferencing and Where in Washington
PowerPoint Presentation

This interactive, collaborative project features classrooms presenting, researching, and communicating about geographic locations within Washington State. Classrooms are connected through their school districts to the state K-20 videoconferencing system in Washington, which enables them to engage in state-of-the-art collaborative videoconferences within Washington and throughout the world. Most projects feature a morning and afternoon conference with 8 classrooms involved.

Presentations
Each classroom creates a presentation revealing required and optional clues about their location. Some classrooms present their information in short dramatic scenes, others use various electronic presentation tools. During presentations remote teams carefully take notes to use in the researching process.

Researching
After presentations, 30 minutes are allowed to research locations using notes from the presentations. This time is short and team strategy is important. Each mystery location needs to be researched, and many classrooms divide into smaller teams with each assigned a mystery location to find. Students use a wealth of resources including atlases, maps, Encarta, Internet searches, and other online resources.

Follow-Up
When the busy researching session is completed, each school gets to ask and answer one additional follow-up question. This part of the process is crucial and finding that one great question is all-important.

Sharing the Guesses
One by one each team announces their guesses for the list of mystery locations. Anxious students discover if other schools guessed the same places. Was some clue overlooked? Did we find the right location?

Revealing Locations
When all guesses are made, the live feed is rotated to each school once more as they reveal Where in Washington they are located, and the conference ends with everyone saying goodbye.

What do educators say about participating in Where in Washington?

Everyone had a great time and I saw some fantastic learning going on. Presentation, research, persuasion, collaboration, etc. What a great project. We have two teachers who will jump at the next opportunity. It was great to see the TOTAL student immersion and also, the use of technology as a resource, not the main focus, was very refreshing.
Brad Klein
Technology Learning Specialist
Kelso School District

The kids loved it. It will probably be the highlight of their year. Thanks to all...I know there were a lot of others involved. Please convey our gratitude for all their patience and efforts. It was joyful education. Count me in another year!!!!!
Cheryl Humphrey, Teacher
Pine Tree Elementary, Kent School District

Online Story about Where in Washington One of our classroom teams is featured in this article

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This module was originally developed by The Learning Space
Website and classroom materials coutesy of Keith Mack