4th Grade: This project tells about the rich history of Australia, including famous Australians, gold rushes, the city of Sydney and its famous opera house and harbor bridge, topographical features, animals, and the history of Newcastle, where our schools are located. (Don't miss the page devoted to famous Australians such as Steve Irwin, Heath Ledger, and Cathy Freeman.)

Third grade students explore their own community, do research, and create video reports. Students from two different elementary schools in Norton, Massachusetts, took an historical tour of their community, with cameras in hand. They studied the history of Massachusetts during the 1700's and summarized what they learned by creating videos which they narrated and posted in Google My Maps. The also included images you can scroll through.

View the map of Norton and learn about its historical sites through the eyes of 3rd grade students.

Fourth grade students in George Washington Elementary School study historic sites in their community. Each student chooses an historic site in Kingston, New York, to study. Students do research, visit the site personally, take digital photos, write descriptive paragraphs, and summarize what they have learned about their particular historic site. Using PhotoStory, students create photo "stories," complete with voice recorded narrations and export them to YouTube. The finished video stories are imported to Google "My Maps," as a final collaborative, class project about their home town - historic Kingston, New York. Their final culminating activity is a class picnic at one of the historic sites, to celebrate the completion of their project. 

Watch the videos the students created to summarize what they learned.

Grade 3 students, from Mulready Elementary School in Hudson, Massachusetts, combine social studies with technology skills as they learn about their own town. The students conducted research, personal interviews, and visits to some historical locations in their community. They learned how the past history of the town affected the current town. They studied the buildings and geography of Hudson. Students recorded what they learned through digital photographs, video, and written notes. Using the outlines and graphic organizers provided by their teachers, they created a tour of Hudson, MA in Google Earth. As a culminating activity, the students and their teachers visited the historical locations they learned about.

Students in Singapore, Asia, move out of the classroom and use technology, in a constructivist learning setting, to create new bodies of knowledge based on their own studies and observations. This project enables students to learn about the early immigrants to Singapore and how the current physical and social landscapes have evolved. Students visit places, interview people, do research, discuss in cooperative groups, reflect, write, and summarize what they have learned. They expand their understanding of their culture by combining what they have learned in the classroom with their own empirical experiences. Each group creates a webpage using SITES as a culminating activity