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Created by Julie, Jason and Tasha as their 'quad-blogging' assignment for the Flat Classroom Certified Teacher course 12-1 Excellent resources and comments!

Julie Balen's blog - One of our new Flat Classroom Certified Teacher graduates from the 12-1 cohort. A thoughtful and committed educator who now flattens the classroom wherever she can!

A cool app that helps you sign documents in gmail without having to export and sign and scan. I have a Flat Classroom project manager, Theresa Allen, who showed me this handy app. 

Flat Classroom Certified teacher, Aaron Maurer, has designed an implemented this global project that shares the excitement of the Bald Eagle life cycle with friends around the world.

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.

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.

As Vicki and Julie state, "Once you go Flat, you never go back!" My passion for global education has only gotten stronger through the participation of this project. All of these students that I had the opportunity to work with through both teams that we operated have done nothing but remind why I love my job! Kids are amazing! Simply put. When they shine and show their talents and you know that it is all them that have done the work, then as a teacher/leader you know you have done your job. I simply sat back and watched them blow my mind. It is amazing what kids can do when you place them in a situation where there is no ceiling but the ones they place on themselves. When they remove that ceiling WATCH OUT! because it is a spectacle to behold.

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!"

Studnets of @ebrownorama share their experiences presenting virtually at the flat Classroom Conference, japan this year.

Informative article by Vicki Jan 31, 2013 about global collaboration and Flat Classroom.

Vicki Davis shares her classroom and the use of social media in the classroom and talks about the development of Flat Classroom.

A set of resources including the presentation slideshow from ISTE 2013. This was a real as well as virtual presentation, using Blackboard Collaborate.

Good luck to Eva Brown (Flat Classroom Certified Teacher), this is her Google TA application video. I love it!

Thank you to Duane from Manitou, Canada for sharing his class wiki and how the Personal Video piece is explained to his students. This is excellent teachersourcing!

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.

A wonderful blog from a Grade 4 teacher, my friend and Flat Classroom educator in Beijing, Shannon O'Dwyer. This style of writing really brings the classroom out to the world and invites interaction from a global audience!