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Connecting Cultures For the same reasons but in a far different environment, social studies teacher Suzie Nestico oversees a project that involves 14 schools and nearly 400 students in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, South Korea, and the United States. She teaches students in grades 10 through 12 at the 900-student Mount Carmel Area High School in Mount Carmel, Pa. See Also On-Demand Webinar: E-Learning Goes Global From professional development for teachers in China to the use of mobile technology to bring new learning opportunities to remote villages in Africa, e-learning is bringing advanced courses, expert teachers, and an awareness of life in other countries to students around the globe. • View this on-demand webinar. “We’re a small, rural town of 6,000 with ultra-conservative family values and viewpoints, and most of our students have never gone anywhere else,” said Ms. Nestico, the project manager for the Flat Classroom Project, an international collaborative effort that links classrooms around the globe. She also built a course called 21st Century Global Studies that started this academic year. The course is for students in grades 10 through 12 who, through project- and inquiry-based assignments such as editing wiki pages, learn that working collaboratively with other cultures—an increasingly marketable skill—can be challenging. “It’s a big shift for them to go from ‘me’ to ‘we,’ ” she said. “I can’t help but think that the more kids we involve in projects like this, the more we start to break down some of this sense of entitlement” that exists among students in the United States. “Just imagine if you wrote 200 words on your wiki page, and when you went back the next day, you saw that students in Korea had changed a couple of your sentences because they thought it sounded better another way,” Ms. Nestico said. “There are a lot of sighs at first, and it’s a messy process, but it’s very much worth doing. This is where we truly push learning to the highest level.” Some lessons have less to do with a final grade than with understanding that a simple phrase in one culture can easily be misperceived in another. When a student in California posted an online request last summer for information about a “flash mob,” for example, a teacher from Germany immediately jumped in to write that European students couldn’t even talk about such a thing because of the London riots. And two years ago, during an education-related trip to Mumbai, India, Ms. Nestico had to nix any exclamatory T-shirts that might offend the local residents, such as “Holy cow!,” because cows are considered sacred animals in India.

They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness

Definition of Virtual Communications Virtual communications encompasses a broad spectrum of concepts, technologies and practices that are central to our daily lives. In our society today, we can now communicate with a friend or co-worker in another country or continent instantaneously. We can earn a college degree or take continuous learning classes online with the click of a few buttons. The proliferation of information and communication tools, like e-mail, instant messaging and Internet telephony has revolutionized the way we work and live. How we use the technologies, such as email and collaboration tools, can influence the quality of the work we do and can determine our ability to function as a high producing, high performing workforce. Virtual communications facilitates the ability to know and understand how to access and share information electronically and is a portal through which a world of limitless learning opportunities exist.