Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Flat Classroom - A Global Collaboration Initiative

Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis started the Flat Classroom Project after meeting through twitter and email. Vicki is from Georgia and Julie is from Qatar, Doha.

The term flat classroom was born from studying the book The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. You can read about what Julie and Vicki's classes did here.

You know your classroom is flat if:
1) You and your students expect to have regular, if not daily, conversations with teachers and students from other places in the world.

2) You and your students communicate, collaborate and create products that make a difference to the world with other people in different countries.

We broke up in groups according to interest and planned how we would like to start flat classroom projects in our schools. I joined in on the elementary group conversation. There are so many things we want to do! The possibilities are limitless...

The first step is to join the ning network for this project to be able to hook up with other educators involved and interested...http://flatclassrooms.ning.com
We'll post projects or create our own and invite other people to join in... This is definitely the step we need to take to lead our students into global awareness and becoming digital citizens. Are you up for the challenge?

4 comments:

dayle timmons said...

When I went to the flatclassroom link, it said the page didn't exist. Please check it becuae this is something that really would interest me. dayle

Michelle Ellis & Debby Cothern said...

I could not pull up the site. I would be interested to see it. Debby

Chascinc said...

http://flatclassroomproject.ning.com/
I googled the site and this is the link. Haven't had a chance to explore it myself but it looks interesting, motivating, and engaging. Can you imagine being so globally connected? Makes our work look like baby steps but we're on our way!
-Cheryl

Melanie Holtsman said...

I fixed the link, sorry!