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Great article about the difference between literacy and fluency 

Honor Morman, a Flat Classroom Certified Teacher, shares her thoughts about introducing global collaboration into the curriculum. "Here's what two of my students said about our participation in the Flat Classroom Project, a 12-week project in which we collaborated with 15 other classes in seven different countries to create a vision for the future of education and society based on emerging technologies and the characteristics of the net generation: "[I learned] how important it is to be a member of a global society-communicating globally and working together as a global community is the only way we can solve global issues and improve the lives of all of us. Communicating and collaborating via the web with global partners is how we will do it in future." -Lara "[Participating in this project helped me become] a global leader, able to communicate important global ideas and different perspectives across cultures and borders and share those ideas for the betterment of my community and the world." -Katherine"

As I look back on the best of last year and am looking month by month, this blog post about Living large in lunch duty land got quite a bit of response. Each time you are around children you have time to make a difference in the life of a child. I have lunch duty next week and instead of being crabby about it, I'm going to challenge myself to live large, interact with students and make a difference. Take a reminder about lunch duty or any duty when you interact with students. 

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.

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.

"SpeakingImage is an application for creating interactive images and share them with others. You can also create groups, add wikis and set different permissions to manage collaborative work "

Students from the A Week in the Life Project 12-2 talk about their schools.This is an excellent artifact for comparing similarities and differences between lifestyles and cultures.

An outstanding post from Jodi Amri from Stafford Primary School as she shares her end of project reflection via this teacher blog for the A Week in the Life project, a Flat Classroom Project for Grades 3-5 (8-10 year old). Her last paragraph: "We are teachers and students who want to make a difference in our world. We know we can do this when we reach out to others around the globe to share our common interests and concerns and build bridges of understanding between us. The Week in the Life project has given us this opportunity. It has also shown us what technology integration should look like. In this season when we give special focus to the things we are grateful for, we want to acknowledge the opportunity we have each day to learn with and from each other, as well as to be inspired by the learning all around us."

"Cultural awareness in the context of a global project reaches further than using correct 'netiquette', inclusive language and knowing what time zone your group members are from. At the core of cultural awareness is respecting and embracing cultural difference and valuing the cultural learning taking place." A collection of resources for looking at digital citizenship through the areas of awareness 'cultural'.

Dottie creates an informative video about the use of learning analytic tools across different disciplines and age levels.

"Yesterday I worked with a librarian who is going to help 4th and 5th grade students next week record "narrated slideshows" to practice their oral communication skills telling stories with "story cards" from different perspectives. (1st person singular, 1st person plural, 2nd person, 3rd person singular, etc.) This is an excellent Common Core-aligned language project. She helped me record a 4.5 minute video tutorial about this, in which I show the steps for creating a narrated slideshow using the free iPad app "ShowMe." "