Global Collaboration

Global Collaboration is an empowering opportunity for students and teachers to connect and engage in authentic, meaningful experiences. It is an opportunity for students to learn about people from different cultures and backgrounds. These connections don't need to be with learners in other countries. You will find people of different cultures and backgrounds in different states, cities or even down the street.

This Primary Sources video talks about our world without global collaboration. While this video is an advertisement for the services they offer, it provides a thoughtful opening for our exploration into global collaboration.

Empowering a student to become a Global Collaborator is one of the seven ISTE Standards for Students. This standard includes indicators where students use digital tools to connect with distant learners; they collaborate with others to examine issues and problems; they challenge them to contribute to these collaborative projects, and they use collaborative technologies to explore local and global issues.

You won't have the opportunity to actually engage in a global collaboration project in this course, Ed Tech and Design, but learning about the various projects/strategies, resources and digital tools will help prepare you for turning your students into global collaborators.

Write Our World

We will have to an opportunity to Zoom with Julie Carey at the University of Colorado Denver. She developed the Write Our World project where she is building a digital library of ebooks that have been written "by kids for kids" that document their languages and culture. The best part about this project is that the kids write the books in both their own language and English so that it will be a way to preserve their language.

Visit the Write Our World website and read a few of their books. Explore what kids are writing from around the globe.

Global Read Aloud

The Global Read Aloud project involves students around the world reading one or more of a set of selected books during a 6-week period and then they try to connect with other students who have read the book so that they can share their ideas and thoughts. Watch the What is the Global Read Aloud? video and then visit the official website where they have identified a set of 10 books from which they can select their reading material. These books range from picture books to young adult. Envision how you could do something like this in your future classes.

What's Possible?

This 13-minute video provides an overview of what is possible with Global Collaboration.

How to Connect with Another Classroom

These ideas are great, but how do you find another classroom of students? There are many resources but consider Classroom Bridges website. This is a website that was actually created by a classroom teacher, Katie Siemer, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She created an online database where over 250 teachers from around the world have signed up because they want to connect.

Visit the Classroom Bridges website. Click on the Find a Classroom link and see if you can find a classroom or classrooms that you would probably want to collaborate with when you have your own classroom.

Here is another website that provides the resources, including several organizations and facilitators of online spaces, that can assist in your future efforts.

Finally, it is important to know how to manage a global collaboration project. The following graphic gives some ideas about the steps that you can follow for implementing global collaboration in your future classroom. To fully integrate global collaboration into your classroom curriculum is is not a one-shot process. It is a process that is most effective if your first project begins at the bottom of the Global Connection Taxonomy (see below) and then your following projects progress up the taxonomy throughout the year.

Lindsay, J., Davis, V. (2012). Flattening classrooms, engaging minds: Move to global collaboration one step at a time. Chicago: Pearson Publishing.

Begin your dreaming here . . .