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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.

This article is perfect for librarians wanting to utilize free books and help students "check them out" (if you can even use that term.) Here are three methods, the only thing I would add is that you can create a library with Evernote instead of springpad as well. Pass this one on. "three methods for creating and sharing a digital classroom library with your students. In all three cases, I'm going to assume that you have a source of free eBooks (Amazon's Free Popular Classics, Google's Play Store Top Free Books, or Project Gutenberg) and an app to read those books (Amazon's Kindle app, Google's Play Books app, Aldiko for Android, or iBooks for iOS)."

Tom Whitby shares insights into connected learning - asking if we should be flipping the model and the learners connect to model the benefits for the educators...... He also states: "Major education conferences are including more and more student sessions exploring the possibilities of student connectedness, connected learning, and choices students have in this technology-driven culture." Yes! that is what Flat Classroom conferences and live events do....and more!

It is all very well to provide resources to learn about digital citizenship, but the BEST way for students to learn is to actually be online connecting and collaborating with others globally. This is where the Digiteen Project is SO powerful. It not only uses resources such as this one, but gets students putting expectations into practice. http://digiteen.org

"I wanted to create a post about our current project we are exploring in 6th grade. I am working with a small group of students for a global debate project, Eracism, conducted by Flat Class. We are debating the following topic: "The use of Facebook by students around the world to communicate with one another does more harm than good.""

From Alfred Thompson - former Microsoft Blogger but now CLASSROOM TEACHER. He's one of my go-to people for 21st century skills and I'm glad he's in the classroom again - some kids are very lucky. "Code.org has released their highly anticipated video to encourage more people, especially students, to learn how to code for computers. It's one of the better videos I have seen with a lot of names and faces students will recognize and a few they will not. They may want to learn more about that later BTW. Starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, NBA All-star Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, Drew Houston, Gabe Newell, Ruchi Sanghvi, Elena Silenok, Vanessa Hurst, and Hadi Partovi. Directed by Lesley Chilcott."

Australia/Sydney-based award winning educator, Chris Betcher, talks about the long-term advantages for students of connecting and collaborating globally. He includes footage from his students today who worked on global projects over 10 years ago and the impact this had on their lives and future careers. This keynote was produced for the Flat Classroom Project 12-2, November 2012. http://fcp12-2.flatclassroomproject.org/Keynote Chris Betcher: http://www.chrisbetcher.com http://twitter.com/betchaboy

Aaron Maurer, middle school teacher with student teams participating in Eracism 12-2, shares his thoughts about the final debate where one student team debated in the HS round.

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.

There's a massive educational game being leveraged right now that you probably haven't heard of. It's called Skoolbo and, as of this posting, has seen students answer more than 8 million literacy questions in just under half a year. Literacy scores have improved by an average of 22% since students started using the service.

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.

"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."

RSS is still here. I like this RSS guide written for students at LaGuardia College. Students should know how to build an RSS reader and subscribe to things like Google news search and google scholar to build a research tool that will pull information to you on the topics of interest.

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. 

""The use of Facebook by students around the world to communicate with one another does more harm than good."" This is our topic for the Eracism 2013 project. You may wonder - why did we limit it to Facebook - well, after much-- yes, --- debate-- on our end, every good debate topic should have compelling topics on both sides - we wanted to have compelling discussions around social media and keep with the original spirit of the 4 students who envisioned this project. They wanted to debate topics of importance to promote cultural understanding. If you want to sign up, this is linked to the 2013 press release that will tell you how to enter a team from middle up to high school (there are 2 brackets). We debate asynchronously in a method we call "simulated synchronous" until the finals, when we have a synchronous live debate in blackboard collaborate. 

Crowd funding student potential

We've created the Digital ID wiki with a two-fold purpose: Provide students, teachers, and administrators with a toolkit of reliable information, resources, and guidelines to help all of us learn how to be upstanding Digital Citizens who maintain a healthy Digital Identity (ID) in the 21st Century. Build a collaborative platform for teachers and students the world over to contribute to our ever-g

I agree with some of these reasons - there are two mains issues - 1) lack of good quality e-books (in other words 'e-books' that are really PDF format with limited hyperlinking, interaction and social media 2) a lack of vision amongst teachers to encourage students to write their OWN text books.

Student - Led conference in Hong Kong in March of 2012.  Great idea. Wish I was still teaching upperschools.

Flat Classroom Certified teacher Aaron Maurer shares his frank views and strategies for global collaboration and global education with Dr Z from the University of Northern Iowa. Excellent insight into how to flatten the classroom walls and meet challenges headon to globalize attitudes and experiences of students. Thanks Aaron!