always learning

Jen Wagner and I are so thrilled to be sharing our thoughts about globally collaborative projects at the wonderful K12 Online conference this October. Here’s the title and description of our session:

Connecting Classrooms Across Continents: Planning and Implementing Globally Collaborative Projects

Ready to “flatten” your classroom walls? Looking to take web 2.0 tools to the next level by developing exciting and authentic projects that allow your students to interact with partners around the world? It may be time to tackle a globally collaborative project in your classroom!

Globally collaborative projects are an exciting way to engage your students in authentic and meaningful learning across cultures and continents. Successfully combining a variety of web 2.0 tools (like blogs, wikis, Skype, IM, social networks, etc) can remove the barriers of time and distance to connect your class with others around the world. Not only do students love to meet their far-flung peers, but learning to collaborate and create in an entirely online and inter-cultural environment will clearly be a critical skill for their future.

Learn how to develop a successful global project – from design and planning to implementation and product, see examples of engaging projects from all grade levels, as well as participate in a real time globally collaborative project with Kim and Jennifer!

Although this project will be aimed at elementary school classrooms, teachers of all levels will find inspiration and applicable and practical ideas throughout this video presentation that will incorporate a wide-range of web 2.0 tools!

We would absolutely love to have the voice of the community within our presentation, so we are hoping that you can spare a few moments to add to this quick VoiceThread about the benefits of global collaborations in the classroom:

If you don’t feel comfortable adding to a VoiceThread just yet, please feel free to leave your comment here. Our focus questions are:

• How does your classroom go global?
• What are the beneifits of global collaborations?
• Please share some highs and lows of global collaborations.
• Spread the love – please share a link to a great project!

Thank you so much for adding your insights to our presentation (all credit for the comments of course will go to the commenters)!

We would also love to hear about any specific issues you would like to see addressed within the focus of this presentation. If you have any feedback, please feel free to share it here!

As part of our organizational goal this year, all teams are participating in an action research project. Although each team is focusing in slightly different areas based on their needs and observations over the past year, the ultimate goal for all of us is improving student learning. We’re following a standard action research process:

Lucky for me, I’m on a team with my amazing new colleagues, Tara Ethridge and Jeff Utecht. Although we’ve only been working together for about a month, we were immediately on the same page about where to start: how to best support teachers that are willing to embed technology into classroom experiences – no matter what their level of technology proficiency might be.

After some thoughtful discussion, we settled on our focus question:

Does collaborating with teachers build the confidence needed to take the next step towards independently implementing future projects?

Along with the question, we thought some clarification might be needed about the world “collaboration,” as well as the term “next steps” and “independence,” so we came up with this continuum:

Of course, this is still a work in progress. What do you think? Would this be an interesting action research project? Does our continuum accurately represent the basic stages of growing independence with technology integration? Are we missing anything key?