K-2 Flat Connections - Building Bridges

Once again we have a classroom participating in a global project communicating and collaborating with students across the U.S. and in some international settings. This year Laura Wetmore is participating with her class and they are posting to the project wiki. All classrooms are posting a multimedia greeting (called a "handshake") and a View from Our Window project. The project schools are divided into three working groups to collaborate on a topic, this year the topics will be Sharing Stories and Celebrations. Teachers are communicating via. email as well as a project "ning" and students are using Google Earth to "travel" to the various locations. This is an example of a project that meets the new Global Awareness theme of the updated Social Studies Framework.

This is a map of the schools in the project.

Building Bridges to Tomorrow - FlatClassroom K-2 Project

This spring I have been working with Marypat Bowen's class and the Building Bridges to Tomorrow K-2 FlatClassroom global collaboration with 22 schools. As part of the project each school created video content about weather and seasons in their part of the world that will be compiled using WeVideo. This is the video created by the Yarmouth class to share with the others. 

Managing "A Week in the Life..." FlatClassrom Elementary Project

In the fall of 2010 I chose to participate in the pilot of the first FlatClassroom elementary project with Rosie's 4th grade class. I have met the project originators Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis at conferences and I have followed their growing commitment to global collaboration at various grade levels. Last spring I took the FlatClassroom Certified Teacher course and this fall I responded to the request that some of us manage the second round of the "A Week in the Life..." global elementary project.

Managing the project meant sharing the role with a teacher in Iowa who I had only met online and working closely with Julie to coordinate the collaboration of several hundred students from twenty-two schools. I learned to plan and moderate weekly online meetings on Elluminate (now Blackboard Collaborate), help students from different schools greet each other in Edmodo, manage the project wiki and help all the classes develop group slideshows in Voicethread. This unique opportunity gave me an opportunity to work closely with teachers in several schools and countries. The skills I learned will be useful in any projects that I am able to pursue with other teachers in the future.

Flat Classroom Certified Teacher Course - Plans for the Future

One of the high points of this class was attending the online "pitch" session with many members of the class last week. Seeing and hearing the ideas of educators who are making a commitment to increased global collaboration by students was energizing and even somewhat emotional. I look forward to using these ideas and resources and well as those that will be presented later in the summer with classes next year. 

My presentation is posted at:

FlatClassroom Project: Egypt after revolution

View more presentations from Yarmouth Schools

Flat Classroom Elementary Pilot Moves Ahead

One of my primary goals for our use of technology at school is to increase communication and collaboration. The Elementary Flat Classroom Pilot project "A Week in the Life..." is becoming a powerful experience of interaction, engagement and learning. Rosie Lenehan's 4th grade class is participating and the students are in the midst of designing multimedia ways to describe their lives in Yarmouth, Maine for students in the other schools and countries. We are working off of a page of Web 2.0 tools and each set of reading buddies is preparing a project to post to their team page in the project wiki.

The focus is on creating a media message that shows an aspect of their daily lives in a manner that is clear, interesting and if possible, interactive. Right now we have teams that are using Animoto and Photopeach which can include photos, captions, background music and selected themes. Viewers can leave comments if they are logged in. Animoto allows short videos as well as photos and "producers" are encouraged to select brief highlights which is an editing skill. Animoto supports education accounts providing me with unlimited space for videos. For both tools the students are using my school email to login with our town zip code so they can access from anywhere and I can moderate their projects. Some students are creating or responding to Voicethreads. This year we have subscriptions for 3rd and 4th grade classes to log in on their own and create projects within the K12 Education domain. This allows more students to be on at a time and group projects can be shared within classes or across the school for comments.

A few students are exploring Simplebooklet using my email and the school account password. This tool looks to have tremendous flexibility from as simple as photo and text to as complex as adding a GarageBand soundtrack or copyright free music as well as videos. The group exploring this tool has taken Flipcam movies and they are editing them to show a view of our school. This tool allows interactivity online so we may be able to use it to compile team projects into on on the final project wiki pages.

This intensive exploration of tools is also a chance to work with students on the idea of concise communication and preparing for a particular audience--other students who do not know about their school and their daily lives. Today Rosie's class will be working on their projects, viewing other projects, leaving comments and communicating with their teams on Edmodo. Gordon Chibroski, a photographer from the Portland Press Herald took these photos in preparation for an article in January about the pilot.


(cross posted at http://elementaryflatclassroom.wordpress.com/)