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Permalink Reply by kherron on June 5, 2007 at 10:12pm

Hey to all of you! I am a 2nd year teacher about to begin my first year as the facilitator for a charter school in Kansas that has been open for 2 years. Challenges - convincing other staff this school is not a threat to the public school, it is NOT just for kids with "special needs" (dont they ALL have special needs?) and keeping it afloat. I am LOVE and truely believe in what I am doing and that project-based learning with kids leading is the way to go! Any advice, help and collaboration is invited. I have a ton of ideas some in progress, some spinning, please share your ideas, ill share mine! OH, does anyone know of a teacher out there that would like to join me as a partner and teach by my side?!

Permalink Reply by Ginger Lewman on June 5, 2007 at 10:28pm

I'll teach by your side (virtually) if you agree to be by mine!? I'm trying to come to you next week, but there are a few issues to work out.

Permalink Reply by Jo Rhys-Jones on June 6, 2007 at 3:57pm

Hi everyone

I am new to all this technology myself, but maybe if there is someone out there who is really patient we might be able to collaborate on something..

Firstly I teach in a tiny tiny school on the south coast of England. My class are a mixed KS2 - which means the youngest of my little group of thirty is 7 and the eldest 11 (about to start secondary school, across the bay, in September).

Is anyone interested in doing something - a project across the pond so to speak? - Jo

Permalink Reply by Christine Southard on July 6, 2007 at 5:42am

Hi Jo,
Lisa and I would love to connect with you on curriculum projects. For example, in our social studies unit on the Industrial Revolution the students learn about Samuel Slater. While he is held in relatively high regard in the U.S., he was not well liked during this time in England. Topics like this would make for highly interesting discussions and debates between our students via blogs or video conferencing capabilities. What do you think?

Permalink Reply by Peter Dawson on July 10, 2007 at 7:20pm

Hey and Hello fellow collaborators,

I am a half time Early Years / half time V.P. in a challenging and socially disadvantaged school in London Ontario Canada. I would LOVE to start some collaboration with other Kdgn teachers on subjects or topics such as living vs non living things, community helpers, culture (cultural traditions, holidays throughout the year, etc.) or anything else!!!
let me know if you're interested..........

Permalink Reply by Mary Hricko on July 12, 2007 at 1:46pm

Hi everyone!

I am a library director at Kent State Univeristy - Geauga Campus, but I teach English and EdTech courses as well. This summer I'm not teaching, but for Fall--I have an instructional technology course and maybe a Lit in English II class.

I handle a great deal of the faculty development on our campus, specifically anything that relates to teaching with technology--I am always looking for collaborative projects to do--whether it be with classes--or with research--or with team teaming workshops that we can do for people--I have a learning community on campus for people interested in web2.0 teaching.

In addition, I have colleagues who are also interested in doing projects as well.

Permalink Reply by Ginger Lewman on July 14, 2007 at 7:38am

Would you be interested in working with, advising, or even hosting some virtual field trips? Those could be interesting ventures to demonstrate all sorts of web2.0 tools in a classroom setting.

Permalink Reply by Claude Almansi on July 14, 2007 at 7:48am

Hi All

I joined this group because Ginger Lewman suggested that the discussion on cultural diversity I posted about in Class 2.0's main forum take place in this group: thanks, Ginger.

From 1971 (when I was still a student) to 2001, I have taught in about all orders of schools from kindergarden to university, mainly French and English as foreign languages, in England, Italy and Switzerland (my country - I have been living in the Italian speaking part of it for the last 18 years). And I am also a professional translator: from 1972 to to 1998, mainly of literary essays, since then mainly of texts about the use of information technology in education and distance education in particular. And it's this latter type of translations that got me interested in this use.

So in 2000, with a colleague in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, we opened an MSN group (back then, called "community", which was nicer) for our students who had already been exchanging letters. We called it "Viva Babele" (hoorray for Babel) because the students came from many different countries and cultures, and so the group was also a place where they could post about their place of origin, folk tales, recipes etc .

From 2002 to October 2006, I was in charge of information at ADISI.ch, a local non-profit association whose goal was to inform people in Italian about legal issues involved by the use of tech communication. The easiest way to provide this info was to join work groups and projects dealing with information society in general. So I did, and thus the info I provided also dealt with other aspects of information society than just the legal ones. According to the public service Swiss Italian radio, for instancee, we were the first to open a "serious blog" (1) in the Ticino local area in August 2002, for instance. Then we macrame'd the audio files of the broadcast we were doing for a small private radio into an .xml file to make podcast, opened a Bloglines.com page, a wiki - that sort of things.

The collaboration with ADISI stopped last October. So together with 2 friends, we started a work group aiming at furthering the knowledge and use of "Web 2.0" tools in this Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, which we called Noi Media (1). So far we have done a presentation of these tools at IUFFP, an institute that trains vocational school teachers, and at their request, have offered 3 workshops for next school year. We also write in turn a short column about these Web 2.0 tools for a local consumers' magazine.

Last december, we started exploring multimedia captioning/subtitling - primarily because 2 of us were also involved in a web accessibility project, and captioning the audio to enable deaf people to understand what is being said is an accessibility requirement. But of course, the same obtains for people who don't understand the original language. Switzerland, though a tiny country, has 4 national languages, but this doesn't mean by far that we each understand all the other 3 languages. So on the one hand we are trying some captioning web tools, and on the other hand we are collaborating with Webmultimediale.org, who are developing a flash player that non only supports text captioning, but also audio comment and the embedding of a smaller video in sign language (see A Flash player with Smil support to meet GL 1.2, SC 1.2.5 for an English description).

To sum up this overlong presentation: "Web 2.0" is offering us stupendously simple tools that make sharing and collaboration way easier than it used to be. But these tools were developed because there already was a culture of sharing and collaboration, and it is of essence to use them to extend this culture across linguistic-cultural barriers.

Best

Claude

(1) "Serious blog" must be taken with a big pinch of salt: in an international discussion list, people had been discussing blogs. I didn't understand the word so I googled it, found a blog hosting platform and opened one because it seemed a neat way to make an online bulletin, and to illustrate the thing itself.

(2) "Noi Media" is the translation of "We Media", sometimes used as a synonym of "Web 2.0 - and noimedia was conveniently available as a username for many Web 2.0 apps ;-) We don't have a proper main site, but a web camping mainly made of a blog, a wiki, a podcast, flickr and del.icio.us pages. The blog became a kind of hub for the rest when our hosting platform offered the possibility to have a top-domain name for €12 a year: www.noimedia.org, which is easier to remember than the basic http://noimedia.iobloggo.com one.

Permalink Reply by Jared on July 14, 2007 at 12:34pm

Hey, I'm Jared. I found this group through another teacher on ning when he found out what I'm working on. I'm trying to connect international classrooms and actively seeking out teachers that want to form solid long standing relationship with classrooms from other nations, and who speak other languages. If you want to get in touch with other teachers and create formal relationships between classrooms please contact me as soon as possible. I want to have a decent size group of paired classrooms ready to go before the start of the school year.

Permalink Reply by Ginger Lewman on July 14, 2007 at 12:39pm

Very cool! May I ask to whom we owe the gracious nudge?

Please also know that we're in the process *as I'm typing this* at setting up virtual field trips, which are collaborations of one type. We'd LOVE to have you join in on the planning and implementation of this. We're letting the participating teachers to the legwork. We're simply providing a venue for them to meet, request, and offer collaborative opportunties!

We welcome your input!

Permalink Reply by Jared on July 14, 2007 at 1:28pm

Thanks for making me feel welcome here. I don't want to intrude on what you have going here because I think it's really great. I'm mostly here to facilitate strong relationships between classrooms internationally, but I also have an interest in connecting teachers on a local level. Currently most of my effort is being put into finding teachers with initiative and devotion to enhancing their students education through global collaboration. I also want to strengthen the relationship between educators and parents and I think it is possible to use the web to do both at the same time; This saves educators time and binds them closer to their local and international community. I have specific methods and tools in mind to achieve these goals, but what I think is fundamentally important in getting this process going is connecting classrooms through quality content related to classroom experiences and lessons. The connection with parents is more resultant but highly relevant and important.

I'll take a look at the virtual field trips. I think I may be able to add to that conversation.

Permalink Reply by Peggy Soong Yaplee on July 14, 2007 at 1:35pm

Hi,
I am Peggy and I am a Technology Specialist at Emerson Elementary School. I am always looking for collaborations and finding best practices. I am looking forward to postings on this site.
Peggy

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