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The location of the podcast for the short Flat Learning Action talks we're now having with the Flat Classroom project students and leaders.

An overview of International collaboration on the World wide web. It does mention our Flat Classroom projects, although they left out our biggest projec t- "A WEek in the Life" elementary project which is almost topping 1000 this semester! 

It is finally here. Here are the details on our Flat Classroom global book club. (click the link for more) Every week for 10 weeks we will meet at an alternating time - 12 hours apart. (For the East Coast USA it is Sundays at 6 pm Eastern or Monday mornings at 6 am eastern)  Visit our Book club calendar to convert these times to your Time Zone. Subscribe to this calendar via Google calendar to keep up with events.This is Sunday evenings at 22:00GMT alternating with Monday mornings at 10:00GMT in our Blackboard Collaborate room https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2007066&password=M.065891D192F8072208BF5756999CE0 .   The book club is free and everyone is welcome. #flatclass Book Club Meeting Times Week and Date Time Topic of Conversation Week 1: Sunday March 11 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 1 - Flattening Classrooms through Global Collaboration (p 1-17) Chapter 2 - Impact on Learning: Research in the Global Collaborative Classroom (p18-30) Week 2: Monday, March 19 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 3 - Step 1: Connection (p 31-61) Week 3: Sunday, March 25 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 4 - Step 2: Communication (p 62-96) Week 4: Monday, April 2 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 5 - Step 3: Citizenship (p 97-125) Take a break. Week 5: Sunday, April 15 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 6 - Step 4: Contribution and Collaboration (p 126-157) Week 6: Monday, April 23 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 7 - Step 5: Choice (p 158-196) Week 7: Sunday, April 29 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 8 - Step 6: Creation (p197-214) Week 8: Monday, May 7 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 9 - Step 7: Celebration (p 215-234) Week 9: Sunday, May 13 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 10 - Designing and Managing a Global Collaborative Project (p 235-267) Week 10: Monday, May 21 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 11 - Challenge-Based Professional Development (p 268-293) Chapter 12: Rock the World (p 293 - 304)  We're also inviting the educators featured in each chapter to be with us for the conversations about "th

What is a global project? I define a global project as any sort of collaborative project that involves two or more classes from different schools/countries. There is usually a defined purpose and structure to the project. The learning is usually documented and shared on an online space such as a blog. Some global projects have a culminating event.

Derek Sivers says there is a "flip side" to anything. Interesting, short talk about perspective. Looking at perspectives about how the opposite can be true in other cultures This is great to use when leading students into global collaboration projects and opening their minds to cultural diversity.

Donna Roman is such a great teacher. Here in her Edutopia article she shares how her classroom is going global. Just a great example for elementary teachers to follow.

Kim shares her presentation from GEC13. I've worked with Kim and she's been so helpful to me through the years. Hope this enlightens those of you wanting to participate in global projects.

"The topic of Mobile and Ubiquitous is seen today as personal devices that are used for communication purposes and can be taken anywhere. Common examples of these devices are computers and cell phones. "

Great reflection of a student on education!

This student has done a marvelous speech on Education and giving choices to student. My favorite quote from Andrew ( a student from New Zealand) -- "A closed book test is simply not a realistic situation in the modern world." I'm not putting this on my blog as an embedded video because I would love for you to respond on NetGen where all educators are welcome to join in with students to discuss how education should evolve. This is an excellent video, and as you can see with my comments, there are a few points I take up with Andrew -- it is one of those -- you've gotta listen to this student kinda videos. He makes some great points speaking out for his generation. He says that when he asks his parents to help him and they say "I don't know how to do this" it tells him that it is not something that will be used and thus is unimportant! Hmmm.

Connecting can still be a struggle.

Sometimes teachers reach out and find others are not there. This is what it takes to set up collaboration. I've found that it takes a teacher totally committed to eventually find a person to connect with -- it takes two determined teachers to make it happen -- her experiences are similar. So, if you have students who speak mostly spanish and would like to collaborate -- please please connect and leave a comment on this post. Share resources and places that you're connecting. Sometimes, twitter, as she says, does end up being the best way to connect.

You're invited to join our cultural scavenger hunt!

Join in our virtual scavenger hunt - this is a quick simple way in 3 days that you can meet students from other cultures and "flatten" your classroom by participating in the flat classroom conference. Start the conversations that need to happen. We're kicking this off now, although once it starts, it can really continue for some time. Maybe some of you will bring your students in to participate virtually. If you do this, please give a shout out by replying to the discussion. Join in if you wish! Just another way to flatten your classroom and there are a growing many!

Virtual flat classroom wiki - this is for the conference! We're so excited! Join us.

Julie's guest post over at the Wikinomics blog. Excellent excellent post about how to flatten your classroom.

Free downloadable ebook from Atomic Learning based upon the 7 steps workshop I did for Atomic last year.

Did a workshop for Atomic Learning about the 7 Steps to Flatten Your Classroom and they've created an ebook based upon the content in the online workshop. This ebook is free in PDF form and available for download and is based upon the principles to help you get to a Flat Classroom.

This student conference was a project based learning conference - they learned via a major project.

Here are some amazing clips from the Flat Classroom conference - ustreams of what has been happening. There are some great presentations at the end of this from students!

Estie Cuellar from Texas has a dream to take nine of her students to the conference. While many of us have raised our money from private donors, Estie is located at a school with many underserved children from families in poverty. I have pledged to do what I can to help her spread the word about her situation. She has scholarships for four of her students to pay their conference fees, however, all schools must raise money for their own airfare. This is a great cause and I hope that there are some people out there who believe in the vision of representing ALL of our society here in America at a conference which plans to turn conferences upside down -- working hard to give students a meaningful place alongside the educators who will be attending the leadership strand of the conference. Julie and I dream of writing a book to fund this conference in the future, but for now, we have to do it all the hard way ( a lot of pavement pounding and hard work.)

Great feedback from Kim Cofino from the peer review of flat classroom from her fifth graders. Having students of younger ages review the work of older students (and vice versa) is a phenomenal way to have students do work for all audiences. Kim is one of the leaders and organizers of the sounding board program.

A video about the students in Texas and their struggle to raise money to come to the Flat Classroom conference - this is a great piece and captures so much of the essence of what makes this project so special - it is so much bigger than any of us and a HUGE undertaking for any teacher - but is so worth it. I find it so interesting that so many schools don't have "room" in their curriculum for these experiences.

Susan Silverman knows how to do elementary projects -- Her fall project is the Online Autumn Revival and includes Kindergarten, 1st grade and 2nd grade classes. This is a great one.