I think Chris Leach invented this but I’ve used it and it’s fabulous!

Get the children to set up twitter accounts using the names of robots from Planet Qej.  The robots  are landed by space capsule somewhere on Planet Earth with a mission to collect data about this unknown planet.  Teacher is mission control back on Planet Qej.  You could give each child a specific data gathering task or you could run this as a group activity with each team having a single twitter account – or you could just start them off and make it up as you go, setting mini assignments in response to pupil tweets!

Integrate the use of Google Earth to develop the theme and be prepared to send pictures and url to move the project forwards. See it happening at https://twitter.com/Planet_QEJ or look at the screen shots below to get a better idea.

Work out before you start how you are going to end it.  Will it be for a certain number of lessons? Will it run over a time period e.g the last 2 weeks of January? Will there be a fixed number of assignments to complete or do you differentiate and keep giving more assignments to the quicker ones? What are they going to do with their findings at the end? This could include preparing a Glog, adding information to a data base or wii etc.