PPSP planning list

["Carol Willis" <>]

Hello everyone!  I hope all is well with you.  I suspect you have been
wondering what happened to our project???  I take blame for allowing so
much time to lapse but I am back onboard with our plans.  I would like
to introduce Lea Bentley Castillo who took over John Korb's position. 
Lea is a lifetime educator and has over fifteen years experience in the
distance learning arena.  I first met Lea when she was synchronizing
content development and delivery to classrooms worldwide at NASA’s
Digital Learning Network.  You can imagine my excitement when Lea joined
the TETN Office as the Advanced Applications and Distance Learning
Specialist.

Lea will be sending an email this week to the schools who participated
last Fall in the PPSP presentations.  The purpose of her email is to
review the original time line of the project and survey the schools
concerning the best dates for a student project. We want to avoid a
conflict with state testing preparation and test days.  From the results
of the survey we will set the dates for student research and synthesis,
office hours and the culminating conference in coordination with your
schedules.

I apologize for the lapse in time and look forward to continuing our
work. 

Carol

As a reminder the original dates are as follows:

Initial Project Launch October 2012 (Completed)
The project will begin with an initial video conference hosted by one
of the nations presidential libraries.  The video conference will
outline for students and teachers the project (topics, themes, goals,
events, presentations, etc) and review resources available to students
for research using primary source documents.  An engaging presentation
element should be included in the project launch to engage students in
the content.  

Content Specific Presentations November and December 2012 (Completed
and Archived)
During these presentations content providers (i.e. the National Parks
Service, the Presidential Libraries, etc) will present specific content
relevant to topics outlined during the Project Launch videoconference. 
These presentations will be keeping in line with the theme of democracy
and presidential policy and will be relevant to a wide range of
educators seeking to integrate the information into their curriculum.  

Student Research and Synthesis -  January-April 2013
During this time students will:
        select a topic based on a list provided by the content
providers
        research their topic
        create presentations utilizing primary source resources from
collaborators and content specific presentations.  
Presentations design should fall into one of these three formats 
        a student created video
        a live student led performance
        a debate between two participating classrooms
Content providers will provide virtual office hours during the research
and synthesis process so students can ask questions about their topic
and get help retrieving primary source documents.  

Closing Conference and Student Presentations May 2013
The culminating conference will be a student led event where student
teams present the information they've learned in one of the three
formats listed above.  Each presentation must have an interactive
portion that encourages audience participation.  Presentations will be
no longer than 10 minutes and students will be required to document
their resources with 80-100% being primary source documents.