INTRODUCTION

The communities in which we live are so complex and familiar that ordinarily we hardly give a thought to most of what we observe on the surface. How can a focus on one of a community's most mundane aspects--its walls--stimulate an interest in digging below the surface to discover histories, values, and hidden human stories? What can students learn about their own community when they are turned loose in it with a purpose?

PROJECT OVERVIEW

In this project, students investigate the walls in Talking Walls as a way of focusing on the study of worldwide cultures and history. They then apply this concept to their own community, researching local "walls" and making interactive, multimedia desktop presentations on these walls using mPOWER.

Phase 1: Learning about walls as manifestations of cultures

Invite students, working in groups of three or four, to explore Talking Walls and learn about communities, people, cultures, and their histories through the walls they have built, written on, and interacted with. After students have investigated a variety of the stories about walls, begin a class discussion about the ways in which focusing on walls can help us understand the people "behind" the walls.

Phase 2: Thinking about the walls close to home

Shift the discussion to walls in the students' own community. What types of walls, broadly speaking, exist there? If these walls could "talk," what stories might they tell?

Brainstorm a list of local "walls" on which students could focus their research. Discuss what makes a wall a good candidate for this project. Ask students to spend the next several days scouring the community for walls that interest them, and to choose within their groups a particular wall on which they will work.

Phase 3: "Excavating" the walls

Groups announce in class the walls they've chosen, and then offer each other suggestions by talking about the aspects of each wall that they'd like to know more about.

Over a period of about a week, groups investigate their walls, reporting back in class each day or so about their progress. Their investigations may include formal and informal interviews, phone calls, historical research in libraries or on the Internet, and real-time observations about the walls. Students write down notes or journal entries about their discoveries and ideas in AppleWorks, and they collect images of the walls and relevant people or activities using standard cameras, digital cameras, or digital camcorders.

In class, groups meet to organize the information they have collected. For this purpose, they use Inspiration to make concept maps showing the topics on which they will focus and the information contained within each topic, and to storyboard the presentations they will create in Phase 4.

Phase 4: Building presentations about the walls

Groups use mPOWER to create interactive presentations about their walls. Each slide can contain text, photographic images, student-made drawings, charts, video clips, sound recordings and clips, and links to Web sites. Slides can also feature buttons that allow the viewer (or presenter) to jump to other specific slides.

When the presentations are complete, they are set up at separate computer stations, and groups take turns viewing and exploring the presentations that other groups have created.