Direct Link: February Archive Thankyou to @iEARNUSA and @murcha for moderating the lively discussions! Due to unforeseen circumstances, the February 14 chat did not run as planned. We look forward to seeing you for our March chats!
Well, it’s time to announce the topic for the next #globalclassroom chats!
Our February topic comes to use courtesy of @iEARNUSA, and promises to be our most visually engaging chat yet.
How do teachers use visual aids to share and celebrate their global connections and collaborations on their classroom walls, and within their school communities?
How do YOU celebrate your global connections with your students and local communities? Do you use flags? Photos? Toys? Skype?
It’s time to get the camera out, and take a few snaps around your classrooms!
This promises to be an interesting discussion! We hope you can join us!
February 2012 marks our second Asia / Australia chat – which runs on a Sunday afternoon / evening in Asia & Australia; and in the morning in Europe. If you’re online in Europe at that time, you’re more than welcome to join us!
Thankyou!
The #globalclassroom chats are moderated by teachers around the world.
If you’d like to moderate a chat, or suggest a topic, please tweet @mgraffin, or leave your details here. We sincerely appreciate your support!
There has been massive interest in the Student conference Series to date so now it’s time for the exciting part! The Call for Presentations. In the first Student Conference Series Newsletter there was information about how your students can nominate for the Student Conference Series. Below, I have included the link for those of you who didn’t receive the email on Friday. If you need me to add you to our mailing list send me an email or a DM on Twitter!
Click Here to read the first newsletter
Student Conference Series Call for Presentations are due 17th of February for the first Presentations in early March.
I feel like George Constanza at times, trying to explain the premise behind the Writers’ club:
There are heaps of global collaborative projects around – just take a cruise around The Global Education Ning if you are looking for something specific. However, in terms of global collaboration, we’ve taken a slightly different route at The North School.
Most of the global education projects out there have specific goals or themes : discussing certain books, historical events, cultural themes, and so on. While these are great, we have found that it can be hard to align what we’re teaching (which is often tied to whole-school planning) to a global opportunity. And the lifetime of these connections can be limited. So rather than having a specific theme for collaboration, we’ve gone for the most general thing we could think of.
Writing.
All students write. So we thought, if we could offer students a chance to have their writing read and commented on by students from around the world, that might motivate them to write more, and they might find out more about their readers at the same time. We also thought that because writing is pretty much an everyday activity, it means that interacting globally would be an everyday occurrence.
We also wanted to encourage as many schools as humanly possible to be a part of this site. The reality is that global education through technology remains something for the ‘outliers’ of education – it is far from mainstream. We wanted to lower the barrier to participation as much as possible to encourage schools and teachers that aren’t outliers to get their feet wet in global education.
How do we lower the barrier to participation? Well, there are few restrictions on the site. Students get a blog, and can put up writing as often as they like – they can write every day, or they can write once a year. They can write about anything they like – stories, persuasive pieces, information texts… anything at all. And a teacher can have their whole class on, or just one particularly passionate writer.
And with only loose boundaries, who knows what a bunch of passionate writers will inspire each other to write.
Cross-posted at sbaglia.com.
This guest post comes to us courtesy of Marsha Goren (Israel), from Global Dreamers.
“This year, the United Nations will remember the one-and-a-half million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust, together with the thousands of Roma and Sinti children, the disabled and others, who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.
Some children managed to survive in hiding, others fled to safe havens before it was too late, while many others suffered medical experiments or were sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arriving at the death camps.
Highlighting the impact of mass violence on children, this theme has important implications for the 21st century.”
In 2012/13, Marsha Goren is running her year-long “Remember the Children” Holocaust Memorial Project, which is open to K-12 classes around the world.
The aim of this project is to raise students’ awareness about the Holocaust:
In order for children to gain a new insight about the Holocaust, it is my generation’s responsibility to educate the next generation so that they will remember. Only with that knowledge will history never repeats itself.
It is important that students learn to distinguish between tolerance and intolerance. … There are lessons to be learned from the atrocities of the past.Marsha Goren (2012) (Link)
Marsha provides an excellent range of resources, videos, weblinks, and discussion prompts on her Global Dreamers website, and she’s more than happy to discuss project ideas with interested teachers.
For further information, please contact:
Marsha Goren (marsha@gsbi.org)
http://www.globaldreamers.org
[This is a guest post by Ben Gallagher, who is blogging at http://InnovatEd.global2.vic.edu.au]
Coming towards the new school year, I find my mind ticking over new things to do for the upcoming year. However I had this idea late last year, but until now I haven’t had the chance to do anything about it until now as I’ve been super busy over the holidays doing some work for the ICTEV, writing for their Playing For Real game.
So I suppose I’d better get to the idea!! With the amazing technology that is available to us, teachers frequently communicate over the internet, but what about kids from different schools communicating??
What I’m wanting to run this year is something I’d call…
The Student Conference Series
The idea of the Student Conference Series is that students would present something that they are an expert in over Elluminate and it would be made available for other students in other schools to attend!!
The idea for this came about when I had a student do a presentation for Mel Cashen’s grade at Lightning Reef Primary School in Bendigo (You can read about it here). To see the excitement in this student when he was doing it was very enlightening. Harris always new he was good at woodwork, but to be able to share his knowledge with others was very empowering for him. He worked so hard on his presentation, easily the hardest I’ve seen him work during writing for the whole year and he did an amazing job!
The Student Conference Series at this stage is still a work in progress, but for it to work I need like minded educators to put their hands up and say I want to be a part of it! So if you’re interested in being a part of this in any way (providing student presenters, have your students attend ‘conferences’), then let me know.
I envisage the conferences starting during March and probably happening during the afternoons, however if international teachers/students want to take part I can arrange that, and would be very excited! Any other questions, feel free to contact me!
You can contact me in many ways to express your interest:
email: gallagher.ben.j@edumail.vic.gov.au
twitter or twitter DM: @ben_mr_g
A few days ago I posted about my plans for the Student Conference Series in 2012 and there was a lot of Buzz around it! I had messages and emails from all over the country and even from a few other countries like America, India, China and Romania!
So to keep track of things, I thought I would create a bit of a mailing list so I can forward information out to people interested in this as they come to pass. At this stage I am anticipating that the conferences will begin mid to late term 1 and I will start taking student submissions in mid-February.
So if you are interested in your students taking part pass your email address on to me via twitter DM or e-mail so that I can add you to the mailing list.
email – gallagher.ben.j@edumail.vic.gov.au
twitter – @ben_mr_g
2012 is a leap year; and David Mitchell (@DeputyMitchell), from the United Kingdom, is determined to make it special!
We’re excited to share his Feb29th.net global blogging project!
Feb29th.net is going to strip blogging down to a couple of clicks where anyone around the world can visit and blog within 2 minutes. As soon as the 29th February begins in Tonga, the blog will open and 48 hours later when February 29th finishes a few miles east it will close. The result will be documented in one place and will be a showcase of the power of audience.
The Feb29th.net project is open to bloggers worldwide – and is a fantastic opportunity to showcase the power of blogging with your students, and within your school community.
To find out more about this exciting initiative, follow the links below!
I, for one, am looking forward to participating on the day! 
