A Collaborative Assigment for Earth Science

Kevin Honeycutt's podcast was very entertaining. It confirmed a lot of what I was thinking about the use of technology in school. Right now, the only technology I see being used is the School Island program - which really isn't technology at all. It's just paper and pencil review moved to the computer screen.
The challenge of this lesson is to come up with a project that encompasses the best of technology without being gimmicky. Because I am not responsible for designing curriculum or even planning full lessons I am stealing a lab from the Earth Science teachers. This is how I would design it to make it technology rich, relevant, and more rigorous than it currently is.

The current lab has been around forever. The purpose is to have the students understand the long history of the earth and to provide perspective as to how much time different species of life have impacted the earth. The students are given a 20 foot piece of paper and using their Earth Science reference tables each student must place important events in Earth's history on the timeline. Then they are asked individually to complete a worksheet and questions. Usually this is 2-3 class periods.

Here's my version:
An ES teacher teaches three classes of about 22 students each. The goal would be to produce a virtual timeline which is a composite of all the research done by class groups. Each class would be divided into small groups and assigned a time period from the Geologic History of NY table in the Earth Science reference table. Their tasks would be to find out as much as they could in a class period about their assigned time period. They would be given a general outline of the categories of information needed such as the names of the periods and epochs, what lived on the Earth during that time, and what major geological events happened during that time. Using laptops or the library computer center the teams would gather and organize their info onto a project wiki. Team captains (one from each of three classes) would discuss on line and decide on a format for the information (eg., interactive timeline, YouTube video, etc.). Each group would take their raw information, adapt it to meet the format and upload it to the central project site. As the culminating task each student would log into the project and answer a series of questions using the information gathered by the groups. I would finish the unit by viewing the completed project in class and using it to inform my discussions about events in geologic history that I knew would come up again in the curriculum.

Obviously there is more to this than what I wrote here. I just wanted to use this as an example of adapting something we already have in the curriculum to a more modern and appropriate format. What is seen as a tedious project by many students has a lot of potential when presented differently.