Trees Around the World

As part of our science unit on Trees, Wood, and Paper the children in my class began the unit by observing trees around our school. One of my students remembered that she had a leaf collection she had created back when she lived in New Jersey and brought it into to show our class (student initiated action!). As she showed her peers the leaves from the trees around her home in New Jersey, the children began to comment on how they didn't see leaves like them around Taipei. This initiated the wonder in the rest of my class and they asked:

What do trees look like in other parts of the world?

I knew my PLN (Personal Learning Network) would be useful in this instance, so I introduced the kids to Twitter. I explained to them that with just 140 characters we could send a message out to hundreds of teachers who might be able to help us....and they did! I used Storify to pull all of the tweets related to this little project together. Now, the most amazing part is at the end of this Storify feed. On the day right before I was headed to New Delhi for the iPad Summit at the American Embassy School, we received a tweet from @1RTigers. My class already knew that I was going to India, so we asked if they were at the same school I was headed to...indeed they were! I got the chance to meet the fun and cuddly first grade class the very next day and also got to explore the banyan tree they had sent a picture of.  Here is the Storify and some pictures. Thank you to @TRuebush for collaborating with us on this little project. Here's to many more global education collaborations in the future!

[<a href="//storify.com/PanaAsavavatana/trees-around-the-world" target="_blank">View the story "Trees Around the World!" on Storify</a>]