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. 

Educational Passages

Update: October 8, 2012 from the project Newsletter:

5 Maine Maritime Launches

The “State of Maine” training ship launched 5 mini-boats approximately 250 miles north of the Bahamas on May 11^th.  Within 10 days these boats got “battered” off the Carolinas by tropical storms Alberto and Beryll which blew all 5 boats across the Gulf Stream and on to the Carolina beaches.  A charter fishing boat captain told us in his 46 years he had never seen the seas so rough.  One of our boats was found by surfers on Cape Hatteras, two ended up on uninhabited islands and another went ashore on Myrtle Beach.  The 5^th boat stopped reporting several miles off the beach and probably founded coming ashore.  Four of the five boats were recovered undamaged with their rigs intact attesting to their solid construction and their ability to transit our world’s oceans.

        

Two boats were taken to Charleston, South Carolina and put back aboard the “State of Maine” to be re-launched off Cape Hatteras, another boat was re-launched by surfers, and the 4^th boat was released by the School of Coastal Studies on Cape Hatteras.  These 4 boats traveled up our east coast to Newfoundland where 2 made landfall and are currently being repaired and readied for re-launching in early October and the other 2 appear to be on their way to Europe.  All these boats can be monitored at http://www.ne fsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_ep_2012_1.html.

June 3, 2012

A group of 4th graders who are in the Communications and Math Lab groups with Molly Smith (Talents grades 3-8) have taken on the task of following one of five drifting miniboats that were launched this spring. The boat was launched Saturday, May 12 by the crew of the State of Maine (Maine Maritime). The kids are in contact with the captain and they are working on latitude, longitude, rate of speed and some of the other concepts of navigation.

Based on a workshop session at a conference on Science and Literacy held at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute a few months ago we decided to look for a way for our students to participate in a "miniboat expedition". For more about this project, see the website and articles below:

• http://www.educationalpassages.com
• http://bangordailynews.com/2011/04/15/news/hancock/students-to-launch-tiny-sailboats-from-mma-ship/?ref=relatedBox
• http://bangordailynews.com/2010/07/26/news/miniature-boat-from-maine-completes-extraordinary-journey/?ref=relatedBox
• http://www.pointseast.com/template.shtml?id=EkllZkuEAyqFSjcWAp&style=story

This project costs about $1500 a boat, but the volunteers who run it (Dick Baldwin, sailor; Lyman-Morse Boats; Maine Maritime Academy; Midcoast School of Technology, etc.) do all the work for free and the cost to our school is $350 for the GPS unit that travels on the boat and a monthly fee to monitor it. There will be opportunities at YES and HMS for that small group of students to share the project with others as it connects to curricula, we bring in guest speakers, etc.

The GPS unit on our boat connects to a company that will show the track of the boats in the project (at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_ep_2012_1.html). We don't know how many months to expect the boat to be en route, one boat arrived in Ireland after 5 months, another one took a year to travel from Puerto Rico to Portugal. The hope is that if a boat makes it to Europe the students can connect with the school that retrieves the boat.

As of May 30th the miniboats have been moved by hurricane winds are are all beached on the Carolina coasts. Today there was an article in the Hatteras newspaper about the people who found the Yarmouth boat on the beach and the next steps for getting it back out onto the ocean.

http://islandfreepress.org/2012Archives/05.29.2012-MaineStudentsSailboatIsLostAndThenFoundOnHatteras.html

Resources: Educational Passages Endeavor Wiki

cross posted at:

http://showcase.yarmouthschools.org/2012/05/educational-passages-miniboat-project.html

 

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.

Global Projects and Collaborations

Some of the most powerful learning opportunities that recent technologies have made available to our students are global collaborations. Over the last year I have expanded my professional network and I have had the tremendous opportunity to connect with several teachers who have started global projects.

Last fall I participated in the pilot elementary FlatClassroom® project and last spring I joined a group of teachers in the Flat Classroom Certified Teacher's Course based on the upcoming book by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay. To followup on the learning from those experiences I am helping to manage the FlatClassroom elementary "A Week in the Life..." project which has over 500 students comparing and contrasting their communities, schools, languages and environments. The students are meeting each other in Edmodo and the wiki for that project will be up later this week. The next round of this project starts in February, 2012 and that timing will allow our third grade students to join in as part of their countries unit.

Some second grade classes are connecting with other schools around the "community" unit that is hosted at the wiki: http://ispycommunity.wikispaces.com/. Classes are starting this project this week and the final product will be Voicethreads from each school.

A fourth grade class is connecting with other readers on the Read Across the Globe wiki. This will be a good experience of reading and writing with other students before our fourth graders start their own writing blogs. The first book we are reading is In My Family by Sheila Kinkade & Elaine Little with a forward by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

Throughout the year we are planning to work with several other global collaborations including the Global Classroom Project 2011-2012 that was started by teachers in Ohio and Australia and is posted at http://globalclassroom2011-12.wikispaces.com/

I have found some of these projects through my online Professional Learning Network (sometimes called a PLN) and others through "clearinghouses" for global projects like the Global Education Collaborative ning hosted by Lucy Gray.

Flat Classroom Certified Teacher Course

Our reading for the course this week revisits the ideas of "push" and "pull" technologies. For my purposes there are so many resources that I could pick up and read that I prefer to use some form of "pull" to select certain items and have them come directly to my desktop. Several years ago I set up a Bloglines account and had feeds coming in from educators, technology colleagues, newspaper columnists and others. I rarely took the time to check the results and kept looking for ways to select the ones I would really read and learn from. Then came Google Reader and I could organize and winnow a bit. I still have both accounts, but my latest attempt at seeing many headlines and blog posts at a glance is m renovated iGoogle with my Google Reader gadget coming into it. I have set my iGoogle as the start page for my favorite browser and I am making a commitment to set aside pieces of time each week to scan and read.

My reality is that I most often use Twitter at a glance during my work day and I rely on the people I follow to send and resend links so that I don't miss too many posts. Some of the people I follow are in my Gmail Buzz and I value having their posts stay there in case I miss them in Twitter. My original reason for establishing a Personal Learning Network was that I am the only one in my district who does what I do. While I'm fortunate to have two colleagues who are also Instructional Integrators, I am the only one who is at the elementary level. I have an amazing colleague in Southern Maine in Bob Sprankle and he and I have sometimes collaborated on presentations at the annual fall MainED conference. There are other people I connect with who are geographically available for occasional face-to-face contacts, but much of my professional collaboration is online in some form.

Diigo for sharing bookmarks, reading and communities of learners is a "pull" tool that I can't imagine not having. The possibilities of tags for organizing, making lists & slideshows and sharing with groups make it essential to me. While I have taught Diigo in courses I teach, I have been trying to find a chance to introduce it to all of the faculty at school. I hope to be able to do that in May of this year.

This week I expect the arrival of my new iPad2 and I look forward to that as a new tool for viewing, reading, and occasionally responding to my learning network.

http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/three-versions-of-the-ipad-2-are-expected-in-2011-20101228/

Global Awareness with Panwapa

Many thanks to Brett Pierce (Executive Director of Panwapa at Sesame Workshop) for visiting our school and teaching a lesson on "Needs and Wants" from the Panwapa Teacher Materials. The students have enjoyed our explorations with Panwapa cards as a way to discover the interests of students around the world. We look forward to the upgrades that are planned for Panwapa including links to Google Earth. Our third graders have explored continents, regions of the world and the lives of children in other cultures.

Exploring Countries and the World

Third graders have continued to explore the world using Google Earth for locating Journey North Mystery Classes, becoming Panwapa Kids and continuing to excitedly learn about continents, cultures and major geographic features.

In the lab the classes have toured the world using the Panwapa site to see country names, oceans, and the Information Booths that are in several countries. Once they have completed some time touring they join the site by becoming Panwapa Kid "USA 104,_ _ _". Creating this login and using a shared password so we can prompt them if they forget are part of Internet Safety conversations we have about creating an online identity. As part of creating a Panwapa Card students create a character and a home, then they select their favorite food, music, sport, activity, etc. We created a list of all the Panwapa IDs and sent each child home with her/his own. Students can go to any country, zoom in and see the cards created by students around the world.

Rethinking the "Country" unit

Earlier I blogged about the excitement in the room when I introduced Google Earth to a class of 3rd graders. The next step is to find ways to connect our students to real images, stories and experiences of students their age in other countries. As they learn about different languages, currencies, time zones and land forms, we want our kids to get a feel for another culture. Last night over 100 international educators viewed Kim Cofino's K12online presentation posted below in the "Fireside Chat" format and she has created a fabulous wiki of resources I will be exploring with the third grade team of teachers. I have created a group on the K12online ning and would love to have others join it so we can share ideas about bringing country study into new realms of global collaboration.

Exploring Google Earth & Google Maps

This week we started geography and world cultures awareness with 3rd graders by introducing Google Earth and Google Maps. Click to start the SchoolTube video as they share their excitement about these learning tools.