About starting the project:

Our school years in high school are divided into 5 (or in some schools 6) 6 - 8-week periods. The students can choose fairly freely which courses they take in which period as long as they complete all the obligatory courses as well a the required number of optional courses in order to graduate.
This system means that the groups we teach change approximately every  7 weeks and in our school with about 540 students, there are always several new faces in every new course.

We just started a new period yesterday and I have two new groups in which most of the students seem to be previously unfamiliar to me, so I have no clear idea of their skills in English at the moment. As I am writing this, I'm still undecided which group I will get involved in the project for this course or whether I'll have them both do something. The problem is that they do have the study books they have bought, so whatever project I will have them do, can't take too much time from studying at least the main topics of the text book; otherwise there will be complaints about "wasting the students' money on books they didn't need"... So I'll have to find a balance between the project and the "normal" stuff we do.

By the way, it IS so nice to finally get organised concerning useful links that I need or may need. I have added a few here again. The Worldmapper and BBC's How Big Really are truly nice visual representations of geographical, ecological, historical etc things in the world.Good prompts for discussions or writing for example. TED Talks is also one I have used; the students watch a video of their choice and write a comment.