We all know the pressure to show that what we are doing in the classroom is “best practices” and “research-driven.” Chapter Two,Impact on Learning: Research in the Global Collaborative Classroom, explores the current research as well as the challenges to researching a global collaborative classroom.
A comment that jumped out at me was this one from Theresa Allen (our co-moderator for our first Virtual Book Club meeting!):
“… global education satisfies a hunger that grows knowing that there are other students who want to learn just as much as they want to learn about what is beyond their classroom walls. They want to interact, find similarities, common knowledge, and work toward the same goal – together.”
I can’t help but think that we must harness this curiosity in students. How exciting to provide students with the opportunity to satisfy a craving to learn about the world around them! There must be a way to document and quantify this craving? How can we as educators unite with the researchers to confirm the power of global projects and to promote their wider usage?
What do you think?
What other ideas and thoughts do you find compelling in this chapter?
One quote that stood out to me was “For the first time in history, our job as educators is to prepare our students for a future we cannot clearly describe” – David Warlick.
This quote stood out because of my experience raising my own two children. My son is 25; daughter, 21. They graduated from high school in 2006 and 2010 respectively. When my son first entered Kindergarten, the internet was just beginning. Now he uses it regularly in his job and daily life. A recent conversation with my children during Thanksgiving stood out to me. My nephew will be starting Kindergarten next year. My kids were talking about all the cool things that were invented since they entered school. We talked about the internet and Web 2.0 tools/Social Media sites, Smartboards, iPads, Smartphones, etc… I asked my kids which of these tools they got to use in their classrooms. I was shocked at their response…”None.” They said the teachers got to use some of these, but not them. They had to wait until they got home.
I am sad to think about the lost opportunities my kids had to reach out and connect globally while they were in school. While they are both very successful, I do wonder how much more they could have grown with these opportunities.
Wow Lesa, that comment from your kids about not getting to use any of the new tools/resources is revealing about where we are in education! I love this book because it provides so many examples and inspirational ideas to make that shift from the teachers using all the “good” stuff to the students trying it out (and then teaching each other!)
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Kyle,
Wonderful introduction in these first two chapters! I am really looking forward to connecting myself globally so that I may connect my students, beginning with small projects and knowledgeable guidance, and then progressing on to “co-created” projects that authors Lindsay and Davis mention in the global collaboration 3.0 examples.Thank you, Kyle, for initiating this exciting group learning experience!
Gail- all I did was press a few buttons – you are the only willing to reach out beyond your classroom walls and find these connections for your students. I can’t wait to see where you take them! -Kyle
There were a few great quotes that stood out for me in this chapter:
We know that 1 of the greatest influences on learning in the classroom is the teacher. Page 21
– We as educators are the guides – we start and the students continue the discussion, project, etc.
People learn more effectively when engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts when using technology. Page 25
-So true with everyone!
The magic of collaboration comes from seeing students and teachers find their own voice and take charge of their own learning. Page 27
-What a great experience when this happens!
Looking forward to the book club!
Theresa
I was a preschool teacher in 1979 and just about to jump back into grad school at the University of Wisconsin. The question of that time for young children was could they process a keyboard. I purchased a simple handheld game device (Merlin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(game)) and asked 4-year-olds to play with it. They thought it was fantastic and had no issues with finding the correct keys or mapping between keys and the array of LED lights that made the screen.
A decade later, we wanted to know if teachers considered electronic text to be like other text in their environment–books, magazines, and newspapers. After some fancy data analysis, it was clear that text was text regardless of its wrapper.
Today we consider fancy immersive environments, computer supported collaborative systems, and various repurposed social networking applications. All of these appear to be ways to do what humans do–connect with each other and compare stories and each other. In our flat world, it seems so important to take the extra effort to make the connections.
Mark – Great points. It is important to take the long look at these “new” technologies. Isn’t it interesting how young children are so open to learning new technologies but adults take so much longer to accept them?