PES Students Make Global Connections

Occasionally, living in the least populated state in the country can be a bit isolating.  As a result students may not have as many opportunities to experience cultural diversity as their counterparts living in more urban areas.  With this in mind, I proposed participating in the Flat Classroom Project (FCP) to 5th grade teachers Laura Conwell and Debi Hutta.  They both agreed it would be a great opportunity for PES students to share their experiences and to collaborate with other students from around the world.  

Project Background
According the the Flat Classroom website, “The Flat Classroom Project was co-founded in 2006 by Vicki Davis (Westwood Schools, USA) and Julie Lindsay (now in Beijing, China).  This project uses Web 2.0 tools to support communication and interaction as well as collaboration and creation between students and teachers from classrooms around the world.  One of the main goals of the project is to 'flatten' or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working isolated and alone, 2 or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom. The project is designed to develop cultural understanding, skills with Web 2.0 and other software, experience in global collaboration and online learning, and awareness of what it means to live and work in a flat world.”

Our Experience
The FCP has a variety of projects for different age groups.  We participated in the elementary version which is called A Week in the Life.  Twenty four schools representing six different countries were involved in our cohort (you can see a list of the schools at the bottom of this webpage). 

The project began with the students creating digital group handshakes in the form of custom puzzles (here is an example) to introduce their classes and where they were from.  This was attached to a quiz in Edmodo so that that other classes could guess the class country and have introductory discussions.

The next step was to put students in groups according to the subcategories they would focus on.  These included: leisure time, clothing, language, housing, school, transportation, food, environment, and celebrations. The students then made their own individual handshakes to begin interacting in their subgroups.  Click on links below and then on the images in the Edmodo post to see some examples:

Example 1

Example 2

Over the course of a few weeks students were given time to get to know people in their groups through Edmodo discussions.  They also discussed ideas for media that they could use for their final project.  Here are some examples of their Edmodo conversations:

Before transitioning into the next phase of the project we held a full group media collection day at PES. We gave all the students cameras and had them take pictures that they could use for the final project. All images were placed in a shared Google Folder so that they were accessible to the entire group.  

The Final Project

The culminating project was for students to create a Voicethread.  A Voicethread is a collaborative tool for creating and commenting on images and short videos.  Here are a few examples.  These are still works in progress but you will get an idea of what they are.  

This one is on topic of celebrations.

This Voicethread is on the topic of leisure time.  

A Great Learning Experience

This project turned out to be a great learning experience for teachers as well as students.  As teachers we had the opportunity to use a wide variety of Web 2.0 technology tools to collaborate with students and other teachers, many of whom were located on the opposite side of the planet.  These tools included: Wikis, Ning, Edmodo, VoiceThread, LiveBinders, Google Docs, Google Groups, and GoToMeeting.

Students made connections and were engaged in the learning as they discussed culture with students from across the globe. One student was shocked that a person in China liked to ice skate just like she did.  She instantly made a connection to this young lady and they had a great discussion comparing the similarities of their cultures. The project also helped students to understand cultural differences, one student received a picture of food from China and their instant reaction was “yuck, that looks disgusting!” We were able to have conversations about cultural sensitivity and respect for differences among cultures.  Students were also amazed by the transportation students used to get to school, one students said “ I can’t imagine having to take the metro to school, I don’t even know what a metro is but it looks scary!” The Flat Classroom Project opened students’ eyes, making them more aware of different cultures and allowing them to connect and collaborate with a global community of learners.