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!

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!

Chat Details – February 2012:

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!

February 11 / 12

• 3PM New York, 8PM London – Saturday, February 11
• 7AM Sydney, 9AM Auckland – Sunday, February 12
• Or click here to find out when this chat runs in your timezone.

February 12 – Europe / Asia / Australia Chat – Sunday

• 9AM London, 11AM Athens, 2.30PM Delhi, 5PM Beijing, 6PM Tokyo, 8PM Sydney
• Or click here to find out when this chat runs in your timezone

February 13 / 14

• 5PM New York, 10PM London – Monday, February 13
• 9AM Sydney, 11AM Auckland – Tuesday, February 14
• OR Click here to find out when this chat runs in your timezone

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!

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.

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.

Join us.

Cross-posted at sbaglia.com.

“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.”

A Memorial Project

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.

Working together, we hope to create a world

“for our children with less hatred and more love.”

For further information, please contact: 

Marsha Goren (marsha@gsbi.org)
http://www.globaldreamers.org

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

The Student Conference Series is creating a buzz!!

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

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!

• Feb29th.net Facebook Group
• Follow Feb29th.net on Twitter

I, for one, am looking forward to participating on the day!

The monthly #globalclassroom discussions are becoming a valuable means for teachers around the world to connect, share, learn, and find partners for collaborative projects; and our recent January discussions about student collaboration were no exception.

We’d like to thank Sue Wyatt (@tasteach) for creating this Collaborative Projects Google Doc to share many of the links shared during the chats; and you can explore the Twitter Archives on our wiki.

We also HIGHLY recommend Anne Mirtschin’s (@murcha) response to a question posed in the Sunday #globalclassroom chat – 10 Ways to Take Skype beyond Meet and Greet. It was the icing on the cake after a successful chat.

The next #globalclassroom chats will begin in the second week of February, and we hope to see you there. Thankyou for your support.

• How can we create authentic opportunities for our students to talk, share, learn and collaborate with their classmates and other students around the world?
• How can we enable our students to learn, communicate, and collaborate using 21st Century literacies and tools?
• How can we inspire and motivate our students to practice their English / second language skills in authentic, natural, and spontaneous ways?

Through flattening our classroom walls, and engaging in global projects, we are creating opportunities for teachers and students to learn, share, and collaborate globally.

Yet, how can we make authentic student collaboration happen?  How can we adapt our existing curriculum to enable our students to learn with the world, not just about it?

We’re keen to tap into the collective thoughts, experiences, and expertise of teachers around the globe: which is why we’re putting these questions up for discussion in the #globalclassroom chats for January 2012:

“Ways and ideas to enable our students to collaborate globally”

Chat Details – January 2012:

January 2012 marks our inaugural 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 in!

January 14 / 15

• 3PM New York, 8PM London – Saturday
• 7AM Sydney, 9AM Auckland – Sunday
• Or click here to find out when this chat runs in your timezone.

January 15 - NEW Asia / Australia Chat

• 2.30PM Delhi, 5PM Beijing, 6PM Tokyo, 8PM Sydney – Sunday
• Or click here to find out when this chat runs in your timezone

January 16 / 17

• 5PM New York, 10PM London – Monday
• 9AM Sydney, 11AM Auckland – Tuesday
• OR Click here to find out when this chat runs in your timezone

The #globalclassroom chats are moderated by teachers around the world.