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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"

Fascinating blog post about how misunderstanding the "pound sign" caused a project not to happen. The US school said to press the pound sign (#) but the UK school was looking for the british pound sign - they call the # the number sign. This is a great point about communication and overcoming. It makes me sad they couldn't figure it out and work it out, but great that these conversations keep happening.

Project Summary: Curricular focus is community with an emphasis on culture and geography Incorporates higher level thinking and integrates technology Targets students in kindergarten to grade 3 Five week project that begins on October 8, 2012

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

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.

Thanks to CEM organisers for setting up our Flat Classrooms Global Network on the Connected Educator Month website. We invite educators globally to come and join our network NOW and tell us, via this website form, what you like about this connected community.

Our Flat Classroom Global Community on Facebook. Come and share your flat learning experiences around the world. Flat Classroom updates posted regularly.

"Global Voices is an international community of bloggers who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world. "

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.

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.

Yvonne shares the many uses of a mobile device for communication, productivity and learning

"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.""

Amazing what one of the young teachers has started after Shady Hook. 

Wonderful section of Bernajean Porter's Coaching HEAT wiki. The collection of online tools suggested here are organized into categories of instructional FUNCTIONS - many tools are able to serve in more than one role. While there are many, many more tools not listed here - the goal of this page is to give a framework for thinking about ALL the tools as providing functions in the learning, thinking and communication process.

"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.

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!"

"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." "

""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. 

Created through collaboration by members of Partnership for 21st Century Skills and the talented folks at FableVision, Above & Beyond is a story about what is possible when communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity take center stage in schools and transform learning opportunities for all kids.Visit www.p21.org, www.p21.org/4Cs and www.fablevisionstudios.com for more info.