Global Virtual Classroom

The Global Virtual Classroom (GVC) is a collection of free, online educational activities and resources. It aims to complement the efforts of governments and educators around the world to integrate technology into their classrooms and curricula and to link their schools to the Internet in educationally productive ways.

The GVC vision is to empower, enable and connect students around the world using Internet technology. It provides students with a stimulating, positive and enjoyable environment along with the opportunity to develop skills that are essential in the 21st century: cross-cultural communication, collaboration through teamwork, information technology and website design.

The major projects of the GVC are the annual Contest and the Clubhouse Program. During the Contest, teams from schools from around the world compete in an effort to build websites that best meet contest objectives. Each team is made up of students from schools in different countries working together. The websites are judged
on the quality of their content and presentation, effective collaboration,
and a focus on helping others through knowledge or activities.

The contest runs from October through April, with winners announced and cash prizes awarded in May.

The Clubhouse is a non-competitive flexible program focused on collaborative learning. Projects can include any topics such as: language class exchanges, environmental research, collaborative science projects, and discussion groups. This program can begin at any time and last months or multiple years.

Tags: Internet, collaboration, contest, cross-cultural, design, free, global, primary, secondary, web

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Bassill on August 26, 2010 at 3:49pm

Hi Janet,

I'm from the Chicago area too and lead a non-school, volunteer-based tutor/mentor program called Cabrini Connections. We operate at 800 W. Huron and our volunteers come from a variety of different business backgrounds. Thus, while each student has a primary one-on-one mentor, they can also connect in small learning groups with other volunteers. You can see this at http://www.cabriniconnections.net/learning-and-enrichment

I'm very committed to teaching our teens and volunteers to learn to connect with each other, and with other on-line resources, as part of a life-lone learning and problem solving process. If inner city kids learn to build on-line networks, many can bypass poverty neighborhoods and poorly funded inner city schools as obstacles to bright futures.

While we operate a single program in one neighborhood, we created the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993 when we were forming Cabrini Connections. It's goal is to help programs like ours grow in all poverty neighborhoods. It's strategy is a learning and knowledge management strategy that you can see here.

We have more than 200 Chicago area youth programs in our web-based program locator, and all could be connecting to each other, and to similar groups throughout the world, if there were leaders and resource providers providing the tools, technology, dollars and other infrastructure needed to make this happen.

We have a huge amount of information on our web sites, collected over more than 15 years of experience. Helping other people find and use that information is something that students, or adults, in on-line learning could do as part of their own learning. At the Tutor/Mentor Connection ning site the blogs illustrate how some of this is already happening.

I hope you'll take a look and that we can find some ways to integrate what we're doing with the resources and vision of what you're doing.

Permalink Reply by Janet Barnstable on August 27, 2010 at 7:56am

Hi Daniel,
Your mentor program would fit extremely well within our clubhouse (PEP) People Exchanging Perspectives program. The director for that is Ronda Zelezny-Green. You can email her directly at ronda@gsbi.org.

Great work you are doing!
Janet

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