Telecollaborative Projects: Meeting Teachers' Needs or Not?
Abstract: One of the difficulties with telecollaborative projects is finding out what actually happens in real classrooms that participate in the projects. Generally, we hear the hype about the project but not the reality. Projects that sound good might have few participants or no participants, or they might be poorly coordinated. This paper presents preliminary results of an ongoing study in which teachers whose classes participated in telecollaborative projects are asked about the successes and failures of the projects for their classrooms. In 1998, I surveyed teachers who had participated in three telecollaborative projects and reported results about how the projects did and did not work in their classrooms, including what factors led to successful or unsuccessful projects. The current research is repeating the survey from 1998 with a wider range of participating classrooms in telecollaborative projects.