Mystery State Project

Today, I was catching up on my ISED listserv digests and came across a link from Jayme Johnson over at the Village school. She recommended the Mystery State Skype Project. I LOVE IT! In this innovative Skype project, students sign up to meet with another class to guess which state they are from. Each class comes up with clues to share at the first meeting. From the site:

"Have your students come up with at least 10 great clues about your state ranging from easy to hard. Make sure to stress to your students that the clues need to be fact based and well researched. You want to make sure you include topography. Great beginning clues would be who the Governor is or showing a picture of the state capitol."

It's a bit late to be signing up, so get on the ball!

Open Source Teaching Project

The June/July 2009 issue of T.H.E. Journal featured an article highlighting a new site: the "Open Source Teaching Project." According to their page:

1. We recruit people to share lessons learned about life, careers, culture, and academics.
2. We apply social media as a seamless tool for teaching, managing, and collaborating with others.

Essentially, they are a community of experts who agree to discourse with students on particular subjects...direct access to expert information. You can schedule a class interview or watch a video of a previously filmed interview. Participants range from Nobel Laureates in Medicine and Physics to the president of the Global Fund for Women and the founder of "How Stuff Works."

Skype in Schools Project

Thanks to Lucy Gray's March 28 weekly blog post featuring things that have "caught her eye," I learned about the Skype in Schools wiki. It's an Educational Directory of projects and classes interested in using Skype to communicate. List yourself or find a partner!

Digital Immigrants Making Friends

The entire process of making friends online is certainly different than than the one we used in gradeschool. Today, I met Alex Ragone in person. He's someone I have chatted with on email, in some forums, and I invited him to speak at the AIMS Conference today. I'm on the Academic Advisory committee for AIMS and my job is to select the technology sessions for the conference. I was impressed with what Alex was doing with Skype and asked him to present. He talked a little bit about how building relationships online is necessarily incremental.

I mean, you usually start interacting in text and then move on to audio and maybe photos, but video is last. That enthralls me. Think about it. Text is impersonal and private. Reading is a private activity. Seeing a photo of someone allows you to connect to that person on a visual level and that makes the relationship more intimate (keep your heads out of the gutters, please). Hearing that person's voice starts to shift the relationship even further and then once you see that person in video, you no longer have as many illusions about the person. Your imagination (your private sphere) no longer plays a role in developing that person's personality--it's just reality. Thinking about that process today made me see how the very PUBLIC NATURE of communication, of our entire culture these days is directly related to how we developed relationships in the "Gutenberg Galaxy." I wonder if these rules about how a relationship develops apply to the digital natives? I'm thinking not, but maybe....

Our First Wiki

This past week, spurred on by a post on NexGen Teachers Ning by Kristian Still, I finally got around to creating the Wiki our students will use to collaborate with our new international partners next year. It doesn't look like much...yet...but it's germinating. This weekend, I chatted with Samuel Yalew, the international relations coordinator at a school in Ethiopia. We met at 9:00am Maryland time on Memorial Day, but neither of us could connect via Skype. We confirmed via email that we were both online, but for some reason Skype showed us both as being offline. So, thinking quickly, I emailed him an invitation to my YackPack and Ta-Da! There we were, chatting as if we were old friends about how we could connect my fifth graders with his students of the same age. He's never heard of a wiki, so I look forward to showing him how powerful this tool can be for collaboration. Now, I've just got to develop some guidelines for introducing the tool to our students, and explaining how to use it safely and responsibly. Has anyone already done this?

Click me!
My mission today is asking my fourth graders (who will be in fifth grade next year) to help me design a better logo for our Wiki.

Ed Tech Nomads

Through the Global Education Ning, I met Kim Cofino today and I have to say I am in awe. She embodies global connections, she lives global education. She's got partnerships set up with countries all over the world, and she has already lived practically all over the world. I have to admit, I'm envious. But, instead of stewing I'll allow her seemingly effortless integration of international partnerships inspire me. She's going to be in Thailand next year, teaching at the elementary level. This year's she's in Malaysia teaching middle school. I suppose I'll be the one riding on her coattails as she flies. It's a new spot for me. Check out her blog about successful Skype conferences: http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2007/05/07/4-steps-to-a-skype-tastic-video-conference/

Skyping My Head Off

This has been an exciting week for me, as I have had two conversations with educators in Holland and Ethiopia. We're working on a project I'm starting at my school called the World Village Project. Although there are sites like Epals that will help connect you to international schools, I'm fortunate enough to have made these connections myself. We're designing curriculum for our children so that their exchanges will be about more than "how much homework do you have a night." Of course, those types of personal questions are important to ask when making connections, but working together on a mutually agreed-upon project makes learning meaningful.

Some folks have been trying to get me to lead a NAIS Challenge 20/20 Project, which I will do if I have to. My objection to the program is that it's dealing with issues raised in Jean Francois Rischard's book High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. I think these are all quite obviously important issues to address, but only AFTER our children know one another and have worked together on shared content. If integration really is rule #1 in technology education, then why are we manufacturing relevance for these topics in our curriculum? I'm the first to admit that these issues should BE in our curriculum, but they're just not at our school. I suppose I should admit that participating in the program would help to integrate those discussions into our programs, to introduce a context for the discussions. At the heart of it, I still feel that the conversations like that will be richer once our schools have a relationship in place. Those issues seem like second year topics for discussion.

Either way, I'm thrilled that my school is taking steps towards forming these partnerships. This is the way. This is how we will help kids incorporate both sides of their technological axis.