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.
"Collaborative projects broaden teachers' horizons, too, connecting them with colleagues from around the world. Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) and Julie Lindsay (@julielindsay), founders of the Flat Classroom Project, had never met face-to-face when they launched their first collaborative project several years ago. Now, they have co-authored a book, Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds to share their field-tested insights about collaborative PBL. They lead teachers from around the world on several "flat" projects annually, using technology to overcome distances and connect learners in shared inquiry and problem solving. "
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.