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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.

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"

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.

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."

"This year Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in the UK, has been awarded $1 million in seed-funding for his wish to design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. He hopes to build a School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online."

"MARK YOUR CALENDARS for May 2, 2013!! Megaconference Jr., now in its 10th year, is an international program designed to give students in elementary through secondary schools around the world the opportunity to communicate, collaborate and contribute to each other's learning in real time, using advanced multi-point video conferencing technology. Megaconference Jr. addresses local and national curriculum standards in multiple subject areas. It will also help students and teachers develop the capacity to effectively utilize high-speed networks, videoconferencing and other emerging technologies to enhance learning experiences."

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.

A list of essential tools created by a technology integrator and IB teacher. Used by PYP students for their exhibition work. Of all the tools in the world, it is hard to narrow down to 7, but I admire this teacher for their thoughtfulness in doing so and in sharing with us!

If you look at this editing tab, you can see that GrantG did a great job in his comments of documenting what he did. If we can get more students documenting their work as they edit, it makes the process of collaborative writing more powerful and faster as well as the ability to see what happened where. ""I wrote an introductory paragraph for our section. I asked my teacher and she said that because our topic has to do with current news, we can organize it in a way that includes introduction and conclusion paragraphs with a more list-like format in the middle. This is the reason I added a section for examples. Feel free to add relevant current news information as you find it!""

There is a fantastic feature on wikispaces that lets you drill down by student and see what work they've done. If you click on "recent changes" and then type in the userid and date, you can see the work. I now have students turn in their work on a google checklist - when they edit over a period of time, they type in their id and the dates and paste the link and I can grade with one click. This saves so much time and gives me a digital dashboard of all of the work they've done on a project.

Silvia Tolisano @langwitches shares excellent ways to participate in a conference virtually, focusing on the Innovate 2013 event happening in Brazil this month http://www.innovate2013.org/

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. 

"My best advice is to tap into an existing project. There are lots of them! But before you begin your search, take a few minutes to define what kind of project you're looking for. What areyour project goals? How will you incorporate your content area standards in addition to giving your students opportunities for developing global competencies? What time frame do you have in mind? Are you looking for a long-term project or a short-term one? What scope do you have in mind? Are you looking to connect with a single teacher/classroom/school or multiple partners? What kind of partner(s) are you looking for? Grade level? Subject area? Location?"

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!"

Idelle Melamed from Arlington Heights School District 25 created a Google presentation to share their school's experience in the A Week in the Life, Flat Classroom Project. Wonderful!

I like this fresh approach to viewing SAMR, as a swimming pool with the S and A in the shallow end, and the M and R in the deeper end.

From "The 20% Project" to "Staff Development for the 21st Century" Education Is My Life covered all the big topics in 2012. This book takes the best articles from our blog and compiles them into a must read for the education community. Whether you are interested in technology, 21st century leadership, or staff development - this resources provides information and inspiration to all.

'Quad-blog' post by Flat Classroom Certified teachers in the 12-2 cohort. Excellent resources and discussion points. A very well written post!

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

Flat Classroom will run another global live event in Hawaii, July 24-26 2013. plan to join us now! "Educators and students interested in global issues and improving their international connections should join this conference."