I had a great conversation with Theresa Allen, IT director in Illinois who has facilitated global connections from Kindergarten through 8th grade. She talks about the "Hello Little world Skypers" project and other projects she does with her students and how you can facilitate change.

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!"

If you have experience with debate and are an educator, we need you. Will you take one or two hours of your time (at most) and serve as a judge for the Eracism global debate project? We have students around the world debating now and need a few more educators. Here's information on signing up. We'll train you on how to share. it is done using voicethread. Thanks for your consideration. If you coach debate, you might want to familiarize yourself with this new debate format "simulated sychronous" using voicethread.

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. 

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.

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."

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.

You can access your hackpads offline by syncing with dropbox. Very interesting concept.

Hackpad is an interesting tool. It claims to be a wiki but is more google doc-ish. They call them "smart" collaborative documents. You'll still need emails to invite people. It would be interesting to try out because you can link to other pads using the @ sign and it is also suited to iPHone and Android tools.

Places to go for free audiobooks.

Wow, this is a very comprehensive blog post of places for free ebooks online.

Collaborative Writing Rubrics - this is the rubric used for the video artifact and wikis on the Flat Classroom project. 

This notebook holds many forms, ideas, projects, for flattening your classroom. I like to save original documents here just in case links are broken on web sites at a later date. You can join this notebook or bookmark it to have access to the files contained here (in particular, the permissions forms.)

This article about brainstorming blog content is written for nonprofits but applicable to anyone. If you have a team brainstorming blog content, you should read and share this article. Journal and keep an idea list of what to blog about.

""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. 

Google image search is being redesigned. I hope that one of the big changes that the quote below means is that we'll have more transparency with copyright. So many times, when I ask a source, students say "Google Images." No. No. No. Google images isn't a source, it is a search engine. You must quote the original source!! Hopefully this will make it easier. From Google Webmaster central... "We now display detailed information about the image (the metadata) right underneath the image in the search results, instead of redirecting users to a separate landing page. We're featuring some key information much more prominently next to the image: the title of the page hosting the image, the domain name it comes from, and the image size."

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.

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)."

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. 

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.