My "Why" for Global Collaboration

The Beginnings of my Global Classroom

In 2015, I was finishing up my MA in Instructional Technology from UMUC and one of my last courses was titled something like "The Global Classroom." Dr. Tamara Blesch was my instructor. She introduced the course by exclaiming that global collab and the authentic audience would transform your classroom. I believed her from the start, but I didn't know how big this transformation would be - and how once the ball started rolling, I'd never keep my classroom contained to its tiny walls. The global audience has become such a presence in my class that here it is - 5:16am in the last two weeks of summer break, and I can't sleep because I have so much to work out in my head with changes due to my weebly websites being blocked by the district. I have multiple classrooms committed to upcoming units, and I haven't found a solution for this blogging dilemma. Yes, there are many additional tech tools, but I think with all that is swimming in my mind, I need to just write this down, share with my partners, and we will work this out.

History of Global Collab and Issues in the Past

As part of my EDTC Global course, we had to write a project. My project was a Multicultural Literature Circle which consisted of classrooms in different areas, reading the same literature that dealt with social issues such as gender equality, education around the world, genocide, and poverty. We had to advertise our projects on various sites. I wish I had known the power of Twitter for educators and collaboration back then, but I did not. Still, I put it on Taking it Global and some other sites. I had ordered the books, but by December, no one had requested to collaborate with my students in Japan on my project, so I pretty much gave up. Then in December, right before the break, I had an email from a school in Costa Rica and one in the Boston area. Not really understanding what was about to happen, I asked my 6th grade team cohort, Gina Kahler, if she wanted to partner with us. I'm so glad that I did because starting this global journey with someone else in my building was instrumental to our success. 

Year one of the Global Project - None of us knew what we were doing. We had the vision from my lesson plan and the website that I had built for grad school. But the four us tweaked the books, adding ones that resonated with our unique student population. We knew that we wanted to blog, but also to exchange videos. Year one, we simply recorded the videos and changed permissions to "anyone with the link can view" and then posted the link on the weebly website. The students used weebly to blog. It was a great success, but we knew it could get better. It was also a huge hassle for me to link the 20 videos each day to our weebly. 

I'm not going to dwell too much on year one because we had to make a lot of changes. While it was bumpy, what all four teachers saw was our 6th grade students rising to the challenge and presenting their best writing, reading, literary analysis, speaking and listening that we had ever seen. They were critical of themselves and aimed to improve. They were complimentary of their peers and eager to share positive feedback. Students who rarely participated in the in the past couldn't wait to share their answers on video. This unit changed my ideas for authentic audience going forward. 

Year two of the Global Project - I moved to 8th grade and our partner in Costa Rica included her 8th grade teacher in our unit goal. However, the 8th grade teacher pulled out of the project a week before, leaving my 8th graders with no authentic audience. We read our books, but without the partner classroom, there was no spark to this unit despite the power of the literature that we read.

Move on to year three. I learned from the past experience to not rely on a class to join unless they were completely dedicated. Gina had moved to England and was teaching grade 9, so we knew that our grade 8 and 9 could partner and make this great, but we wanted another classroom presence. I advertised on global education sites, but did not receive feedback so I took it to a social media group I belong to on FaceBook. I actually interviewed the teachers and ensured that their principal and district was on board! We included a very enthusiastic 8th grade team in the Wichita Kansas area. While some people thought that wasn't "gobal" enough for our American students living abroad in Yokosuka Japan, that was untrue as they stepped up as global leaders, showing their peers in Kansas what it was like to live abroad. We improved our sharing methods by using Google suites for students to create a group digital portfolio to share videos, then linked the portfolios to the websites. That required only one weebly edit from me, and the rest was on the students. 

Year three was amazing with three active classrooms. The project morphed as it went to include a package exchange, my students did a literature discussion in town for one of their video exchanges, the students created a Fortnight group, and one girl in Kansas and a boy in my class in Japan started a long distance relationship. Aside from the personal exchanges, we all saw our students shining to show their best self to their peers around the world. Put your student in front of an authentic of audience of their peers and you will see amazing results. Gina and I continued the global exchange by our 8/9's doing a Holocaust Literature unit together as well. 

Now let's go to year four. Year one (bumpy and trial) and year three showed me that the global connection was vital for student voice. Then insert Flipgrid's move to becoming free for educators! At the very last minute in the fall, I asked a friend in Iowa if she wanted to do a mini-global lit with my only whole group novel, The Giver. It was quick in coming together and not as dedicated as the Global unit in winter, but it was a perfect preparation for the big unit to come. Year four was absolutely incredible with my students seasoned in FlipGrid from the mini-unit with Iowa, and our project with three schools for our winter unit. 

With that said, I'm going to pause here because this is what is troubling me. I am weeks from school starting and I don't have a venue to blog with the weebly block. I have a partner in Canada and a local partner in Yokota, so I want to share my vision and resources for our upcoming unit in my next blog post. I will want to share it with my collaborators so we can start this year off #globalfromthegetgo!

Update to the post - I found my blogging solution with Padlet. Read on in the blog to find out how Padlet can transform your classroom with the authentic audience.