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Michael Graffin's thoughts about global collaboration. He's been working with a set of projects including many teachers. Here's his reflections on global collaboration and the first few 2 chapters in the book.

Those of you who teach filmmaking will find this set of filmterms very helpful to share with students as they consider filmmaking. This is a great list to use with Flat Classroom filmmakers as well.

From my friend Kyle Dunbar - if you want to join in - sign up on her blog. "I am giddy with excitement about the opportunity to host a Virtual Book Club discussing the fantastic book Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration One Step at a Time by Julie Lindsay and Vicki A. Davis. The book club was announced last Sunday night in my school division and I am thrilled that we already have thirteen teachers signed up! Even better, we have teachers from across our school division and from all different grade levels. It is a wonderful thing when already busy teachers find time in their lives to discuss powerful educational ideas with their peers.  Now, I am ready to get some global participation in this book club. I can't think of a better way to brainstorm about global projects than to have teachers from across the globe in the session together. So, we are inviting all teachers, parents, students, thinkers and learners out there to join us for six live meetings to share what they think about the projects, resources, and research discussed in Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds. We will be meeting on Mondays at 7:30pm EST on the following dates: January 7th January 21st February 4th February 18th March 4th March 18th (find the time in your area here) Meetings will be live using Blackboard Collaborate and will last one hour. We will spend the time sharing thoughts about ideas raised in the book. It will also be a great opportunity to connect with other educators that share similar passions and beliefs about flattening our classrooms walls. We will share strategies and resources for building those 21st century skills like collaboration, communication and creativity in authentic ways.

Jason Graham completed this video as part of the Flat Classroom Certified teacher course, and the Flat Classroom project for teachers assignment.

This is my public evernote notebook where I'm sharing notes about global collaboration in education, technology, and my notes from conferences. If you're following the leading edge of technology and use evernote, you can use this notebook to keep abreast of the things I'm collecting in this area. I've added Julie Lindsay to the notebook, so, we'll look to collect there as well. Evernote shared notebooks are great ways to share collections of information in a slightly different format than bookmarks.

Duane Robertson has some fantastic examples of how he gets students started on editing their wiki. I love how his second step says "become part of the family." The use of checklists and pointers helps so much in collaboration and helping people get started.

If you have experience with debate and are an educator, we need you. Will you take one or two hours of your time (at most) and serve as a judge for the Eracism global debate project? We have students around the world debating now and need a few more educators. Here's information on signing up. We'll train you on how to share. it is done using voicethread. Thanks for your consideration. If you coach debate, you might want to familiarize yourself with this new debate format "simulated sychronous" using voicethread.

Great reflection blog post from Sunny, a teacher in Australia who ventured to the Flat Classroom Conference in Japan! Full of ideas I've headed home - collected my thoughts and hope to put some of the plans we made as teams into action - because flattening our world - connected across the globe to share experience, help each other and learn together is what education should be about. Final presentations and more about the conference can be accessed at http://conference2013.flatclassroomproject.org/home

My friend Toni Olivieri-Barton mentioned this in a FLAT Session yesterday where we were talking about global collaboration. It is a Video mail sharing site where you flip and send video back and forth. Toni said she'd like to try it with students. This would be interesting to try. This is better than text email for families separated by time - you can do a video message. Interesting. There are also apps for it.

The AAS students are doing an excellent job (many of them) leaving comments on their edits, this is something that all Flat Classroom teachers should work towards. My compliments.

This is a nice example because it includes the addition of new content but also editing of existing content to correct mistakes. It shows that the student read the work of the other student and added her own contribution.

This is an excellent post-reflective post from a fantastic student. You can see that she drafted in a word processor and pasted it in and then embedded the videos. Knowing how to use features of various programs in tandem is part of being fluent in software. Not just can they use one program or another but can they use them together to become more efficient and effective in the task at hand.

I want to point out Terry Smith, a judge for Flat Classroom this past 8 weeks, and what he did as he did his judging. He used the process of judging to see what the students were saying about edtech and current trends as well as to have current information to share his students, but he also modeled excellent feedback by leaving messages for the students he judged. It is the words that communicate presence and the students who received messages from him came to me with excitement. While many of our amazing volunteer judges do this, I wanted to point it out because he did it so well. This is the link to the thread where we talked about what he did but you can also click on his name and see the kinds of comments he left and the videos he reviewed. This is the kind of "flattening" that creates mutually beneficial symbiotic learning relationships but also gives us good feedback for improving what we're doing with the students. You can volunteer to judge projects on this website as well.

Vicki, this link does not seem to work? It takes me to a blank comment form on the Ning.

We all tend to think we are more central to a project than we really are. This is no surprise but is very important for those who think they are indispensible because you're not. ;-( I just think being realistic is important. This is also a challenge for us in Flat Classroom because students think they are important and central EVEN if they aren't communicating and reaching out to partners and this is a problem. I've had kids claim they "did all the work" and when looking at the words, it doesn't bear out. They are shocked when they realize how little they've done. I think this thought process is a a problem for collaboration. No matter what people do, they think they did it all even if the wiki says otherwise or data says otherwise. For this reason, it is important to point out this disparity to teammates and also how to quantify the participation of others. "Do you provide information or materials which are necessary for them to do their job? To what extent are the tasks you each do related? Now imagine that everyone in the group does a similar exercise, quantifying their own relationship to everyone else. According to research from Jonathon Cummings of -Duke's Fuqua Business school, you are likely to overestimate the degree to which others on your team depend on you!"

I had a great conversation with Theresa Allen, IT director in Illinois who has facilitated global connections from Kindergarten through 8th grade. She talks about the "Hello Little world Skypers" project and other projects she does with her students and how you can facilitate change.

You can access your hackpads offline by syncing with dropbox. Very interesting concept.

I met Jutta Treviranus from the FLOE project. This is about creating open resources that are translatable, move from place to place, can be modified and made accessible to everyone. It is has tools that will make your content accessible for all learners. If you're making free content, you'll want to go to this website and look at their tools to help make your content accessible to everyone. This is great because it can help translate into other languages for the content we're creating for Flat Classroom.

St. George's day is April 23 where people around the world celebrate English heritage and patriotism. For those of you who are integrating holidays from around the world as part of your global competency, this is a great lesson to study about Britain. This is a collection of lesson plans on the topic.