Many teachers are becoming aware of the advantages of connecting with international classrooms. Resources for connecting and facilitating these exchanges are at best crude. Examples of these technologies are Twitter, email, Skype, Second Life, IM, wikis, blogs, and GTalk. While each of these technologies are useful none of them provide a classroom with identity or connect classrooms directly. Each of these technologies centralizes the information teachers provide in a way that only facilitate classrooms that are directly involved in the interaction.
An International Education Collaboration Is more than one classroom
connected to another from a distance. Many classrooms should be connected to each other independently and collectively. In this environment a teacher may navigate though the experiences, events, and lesson plans of contributing classrooms; They will be able to collect information and contacts that are relevant to their own curriculum and integrate it into their own classroom environment online and in the real world to the benefit and students and parents alike.
I've put up a database for educators who are interested in this kind of collaboration at
http://www.oratiobrevis.com. If you go there and fill out the short form you will be contacted by me when a teacher who fits your profile registers. Please, only fill out the form if you are genuinely in starting a collaborative classroom project with another educator.
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