It is easy to collaborate with your colleagues around you. What about other people in your PLN? Can you collaborate with 50, 100, 1000 people? "Collaborate", "Collaborative", "Collaboration" were the most frequent words I heard last year and I believe it will be more important and popular in this new decade. Here is my first 20 web tools to enhance Collaboration among us!
Phenomenal global collaboration project involving students from 15 countries. Teaching assignment is replicated across continents. Last year's project, Rock n Sol, was featured in the California K-12 Technology Showcase. This year's project, "Are You Game" focuses on digital storytelling. Students collaborate to compose music, make movies, podcasts, and experiments and met in face to face video-conferences. Using Garage Band, kids annually create a collaborative song that has been touched in every continent in the world. Each week, each group contributes 30 seconds with a specific musical instrument. Even blind students are involved in the project.
NBC Learn, the education arm of NBC News, this week launched a new collaborative learning site that combines gaming and multimedia for students aged 13 and up. Called iCue ("Immerse, Connect, Understand, and Excel"), the service builds on research out of MIT's Education Arcade, housed at MIT's Comparative Media Studies, to integrate traditional learning activities with new technologies.
TThinkQuest Newswire Announcement: Students from 13 countries took top honors in this year's ThinkQuest International 2008 Competition. The competition is utilized by teachers to engage their students in developing critical skills for life and work in the 21st century.This year's winning teams collaborated in the research, writing and creation of websites on educational topics ranging from mathematics to promoting tolerance and preventing bullying.
ThinkQuest International 2008 included 972 teams from 60 countries and the winning entries included students from Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Tunisia, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam. Each team had approximately eight months to complete their final websites. The submissions were then reviewed by an international panel of volunteer judges who selected the winners in each of the three age divisions. The judges also awarded the "Global Perspectives" prize to the team best exemplifying respect for diversity and recognition of global interdependence.
Schools should reflect the world we live in today. And we live in a social world. We need to teach students how to be effective collaborators in that world, how to interact with people around them, how to be engaged, informed twenty-first-century citizens.
In collaboration with several content area organizations, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills developed a series of ICT Literacy Maps illustrating the intersection between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy and core academic subjects including English, mathematics, science and social studies (civics/government, geography, economics, history).
When Christopher Laub was in the third and fourth grades, chemotherapy treatments for his leukemia kept him out of school, feeling sick and weak. But through a close collaboration between Bel Aire Elementary School and Apple - as well as a creative use of iChat AV - Laub was able to continue with his classes. Thanks to the system that he dubbed "iCan," the young student remained connected to his classmates and his studies.
The prevalence of blogs, wikis, and social-networking web sites has changed the way students learn to write, according to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)-and schools must adapt in turn by developing new modes of writing, designing new curricula to support these models, and creating plans for teaching these curricula.
