There's an awesome project happening in two of the 5th grade classrooms at The School at Columbia University right now. To supplement their study of Ancient Greece, Dena Rothstein and Heather Lortie, are having their students collaborate with students from The Marymount School across Central Park on the Upper East Side. (The School is located on the Upper West Side...) Both groups are designing 3D Greek temples using Tinkercad and sharing their online files with a group at the other school to tweak, customize, and ultimately build ("print") in our 3D printers. The humor of us being able to say that we are literally outsourcing to the East is not lost on us.

Teachers supporting this collaboration at The School are Heather, Dena, Greg Benedis-Grab (@gbenedisgrab), and Don Buckley (@donbuckley) with a lot of support from Cristina Martinez (@finlaycm) and a little support from me. On the UES of the park, Jaymes Dec (@jaymesdec) and Lesa Wang oversee Marymount's particpation in the project. Jaymes designed the new Fab Lab at Marymount, and he just spoke at TEDxNYED last month.

Today, the groups communicated "long distance" and "real time" using Google Video Chat. (Cristina Martinez turned on the Chat feature for students just for this project and just for a few days. Usually, this feature is disabled.) I moved about checking on all of the groups. At one point, I observed four kids (two in front of me and two on the screen) discuss their designs and even use a secondary laptop facing the camera to visibly demonstrate how to use Tinkercad to make a triangular hole to decorate the roof of a temple. I thought that was awesome. :)

I'm collaborating with 6th grade Social Studies teacher Monica Amaro (@moniamaro59)  on an iMovie project where here students will research topics about the culture, religion, architecture, medicine, food, language, politics, etc. of Tenochtitlan, Mexico. They'll be gathering their research in Google Docs. Monica just showed me something that one of her 6th graders showed her: Google Docs now has a Research Tool that allows embeds a right-side column for you to google websites, images, quotes, and scholarly writings about the topic.

The most satisfying feature for us so far is that when you located images, they are embedded into your Google Doc and their location is cited in a footnote at the bottom of the page. There is no excuse for forgetting to cite your sources anymore!

I found the article below about using the embedded Google Doc's new Research Tool here:

How to use Google Docs' new Research tool: New feature automates research process, making it easier for everyone

By Leslie Meredith

Whether you're a student facing final papers or a parent helping kids with research assignments, Google has just made the process a lot easier with a new tool that automates the research process.

Simply called "Research," the tool lets you conduct searches for terms related to your document or search for just quotes or images from a panel that appears to the right of your document.

Searching for a location automatically brings up a Google map that you can insert as is or edit by zooming in or out. Photos can be filtered to include only those that are licensed for free use — a good idea to avoid copyright problems.

For Web page results, hover over the link to see a preview of the page. Like what you see? Click "insert link" to add it to your text.

Further, the Research tool lets you insert a citation, automatically formatted, into your document.

Here's how it works: After you've inserted a link, click "cite." Google will add a superscript footnote number to the link in your text and generate a properly constructed footnote at the bottom of the page.

There are three ways to activate the research panel. Within an open document, go to the "Tools" menu at the top of the page and select "Research." You can also use a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+R on a PC and Command+Option+R on a Mac. To jumpstart the process, you can right-click on a word or highlight a phrase to launch a search for your term.

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Yoshiko Maruiwa is a member of the 6th grade faculty team here at The School at Columbia University. She teaches Art, and it is a pleasure to collaborate with her on a few different projects each year. After a unit, Yoshiko tries to have the kids take photos of their artwork to load onto shared albums on The Gallery (our in-house photo server powered by Drupal). They then "point" to these images when writing posts on their personal digital portfolio of their work.

Recently, 6th graders completed mosaics - which correlated with their study of Islam and Islamic art. Yoshiko created the following simple slide show for students to use as a guide for taking better photographs of their finished tiles.