Writing a book with my students!

Background

After eight years of teaching in a technology driven high school and after attending workshops, seminars and conferences worldwide, I thought it was bout time I challenged both my astudents and myself.

I wanted to see if it was possible to find a project that could engage every student in my 11th grade class of English learners and see if we all could work together as a team. Most of all, I wanted to see if they could produce an end product that would be authentic and involve collaboration with educators and students globally.

My thoughts on engagement

Every educator wants to experience the moment of “flow” when all the goals are set and understood and work is moving along easily and naturally. When we read about engaging students in the classroom using technology and social media, authors often leave us with the impression that this work will flow gentle as a stream. When talking about motivation and learning in school, grit is most often left out of the conversation. Yet, according to Daniel Pink, the best predictor of success is grit, defined as perseverance and passion for long term goals.

Our published book proves that when you find the right project — one that really involves all the students — they can find the grit and do what it takes to reach the final objective.

And here’s an interesting fact: The most popular topic to write about in this book turned out to be motivation. It is ironic that motivation and innovation are topics we discuss on almost every level in education, from policy makers and educational experts to school leaders and teachers. We are simply missing the most important link here — we do not spend enough time discussing this with our students. My students’ reflections in this book show us that we should spend a lot more time discussing important topics like motivation, learning, pedagogy and technology with them. In this book, we provide many great examples and discussion topics to get us started.

I am very happy to say that we have managed to write a book that we think will be helpful for teachers all over the world. It explains how to set up your classroom to get you started. It shows how teachers and students can set up blogs, make a Twitter account, use Skype in education and connect with others. I think more teachers should try to open up their classrooms to all the possibility we have with the use of technology!

Our publication of the 200-plus page collaborative book Connected Learners: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Global Classroom.As our press release says, this interactive eBook is

a unique compendium of stories, advice and how-to articles designed to help high school teachers and their students around the globe shift from classrooms that are isolated and teacher-centered to digitally rich environments where learning is student-driven and constantly connected to the global internet.

There are many books on the topic “learning in the 21st century,” and I think I have read most of them. The authors are educators and educational experts I know and admire. Many write about what students want and how students learn. What occurred to me was that there are no books about this topic written by students.

Let’s listen to the students! Want to buy the book? Click on the picture of the book. We are saving up for a field trip and would love to visit one of the schools we have been collaborating with! Text previously posted at Powerful Learning Practice . See full text here: 

Our Classroom 2.0 Book Submission is LIVE!

We are proud to announce that our chapter submission to The Classroom 2.0 Book project is now live. With over 75 submissions from leading educators worldwide, this amazing project was organised by Steve Hargadon, Richard Byrne, and Chris Dawson of the Classroom 2.0 network.

Now, we need YOUR help!

We’d truly love to have the #globalclassroom story published in a print book for the very first time. (One day, we might write our own. Until then, this is the next best thing!)

If you could take a few minutes to read our submission, and share it with your networks, we’d be extremely grateful. The more readers we get, the more likely we are to be included.

Thank you to Deb Frazier, Theresa Allen, Effie Kyrikakis, and Kyle Dunbar whose contributions made this chapter submission possible. We hope you enjoy reading our #globalclassroom stories.

The Global Classroom Project – Classroom 2.0 Book

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What does family mean to you? What does it mean to your students?

Families depend on each other a lot. They show each other how to handle problems and they show support to each other when help is needed. They show how to set goals and they care for one another…

“A day my sisters had to depend on me was on Mother’s Day a couple years ago.” (read more)

” The person I really depend on is my brother. I just want him to be around when I need him. My mom I really don’t depend on because I know she is going to be here regardless. But my brother…I depend on him because he needs to be here when something happens. I mean my mom can protect me but not like my brothers can or dad.” (read more)

 

“One time that my family depended on me was when my grandfather was very sick because of his diabetes.” (read more)

Above are three responses from students about what family means to them. Their Language Arts teacher provided the opening sentences but then the students took it from there. They wrote about times they helped their families, times their families helped them and times their families let them down. Each essay told a new story and shed new light on the nature of families. But the essay also shared commonalities: how connected we are with our families, how our actions impact on families and how our families’ action impact us. Read more of the students essays here.

But what we want to know now is:

How similar are families around the world?

We have issued ourselves a challenge. Can we find students from 10 different countries to share with us what their families mean to them? By May 1st?

Will your classroom be one of them?

 

We would love that! If you are interested, leave me a comment here, contact me on Twitter @edtechdunny, or just go ahead and join our wiki. We can send you more information about how to add your essays to our wiki. But basically, if you can type up your essays, we can add them to our site! Let’s give our students a chance to learn about families everywhere and to see a world bigger than their own.

Everybody’s doing something; we’ll do nothing!

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.

Join us.

Cross-posted at sbaglia.com.