Flat Classroom Certification: Celebration

Flat Classroom™ Certification Series Intro

This semester, I’ve been participating in the Flat Classroom™ Certified Teacher Course, and the time has come to document all the work I’ve done on the 15 challenges, which are aligned to the 7 Steps to Flatten Your Classroom: (1) Connection, (2) Communication, (3) Citizenship, (4) Contribution and Collaboration, (5 and 6) Choices and Creation, and (7) Celebration plus two more challenges unique to us as educators – Global Project Design Essentials and Putting it All Together.

20 Students, 3 Professional Presentations, 1 Amazing Week!

This November, my students and I created and delivered three professional presentations to share their experiences in the NetGenEd Project and the Flat Classroom™ Project with fellow students, educators, and other interested audience members around the globe!

Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum

On Nov. 12 Connor, Helena, Talia, Mia, and I presented “The World is Flat and Your Classroom Can Be Too: Learning and Teaching with Global Peers in the Flat Classroom™ Project” at the Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum in San Francisco, California (Twitter/Social Media hashtag: #FF2010). Our session was well-attended and enthusiastically received by the participants. The slides, notes, and resources from our presentation are available on the CES Fall Forum page of our class wiki, and thanks to our friends from Trinity, here’s some video footage they captured during our session . . .

Student Summit

On Nov. 18 at 9:00 AM USA/Central (3:00 PM GMT) all 16 students in the 1st and 2nd period Global Leadership classes presented their Student Summit as part of the Global Education Conference that took place Nov. 15-19 (Twitter/Social Media hashtag: #GlobalEd10). They answered lots of thoughtful questions from the audience, and you can see a recording of their presentation being archived by Elluminate.

Global Education Conference

On Nov. 18 at 7:00 PM USA/Central (1:00 AM GMT) Catherine, Edward, Scott, and I also presented 21st Century Literacy and Global Competencies Flourish in the Flat Classroom™ Project as part of the Global Education Conference. They were very pleased to have a small but interested virtual audience, and a recording of their session is available from Elluminate.

Flat Classroom Certification: Choices and Creation

Flat Classroom™ Certification Series Intro

This semester, I’ve been participating in the Flat Classroom™ Certified Teacher Course, and the time has come to document all the work I’ve done on the 15 challenges, which are aligned to the 7 Steps to Flatten Your Classroom: (1) Connection, (2) Communication, (3) Citizenship, (4) Contribution and Collaboration, (5 and 6) Choices and Creation, and (7) Celebration plus two more challenges unique to us as educators – Global Project Design Essentials and Putting it All Together.

Giving Students Choices

Many years ago, as an English teacher, I decided that when assigning writing tasks to my students, I would always give them some degree of choice. My basic rule of thumb was that they should be able to choose their topic or the form of their writing, if not both. If I needed them to write about a particular work of literature, they would have a choice of modes with which to demonstrate their understanding. If we were working on writing in a particular mode, they would have choice over the content.

Creativity is all about making choices

Here’s an example of one such writing assignment I designed for my students in 9th grade English language arts at The International School of the Americas. Backing into Ekphrasis: Reading and Writing Poetry about Visual Art describes how I introduced students to ekphrastic poetry, took them to a local museum, and guided them in writing a ekphrastic poem of their own in response to any piece of artwork they chose.

For the last four years, I’ve also been teaching a course on “Reading Instruction in the Middle Grades” at Trinity University. As part of this course, I have each student engage in an individual semester-long inquiry into a topic of their choice. And for the first three years, they created multi-genre research papers to share their learning. But this year, I had them compose a multimodal, multi-media text to present their research.

Although their topic was required to be connected to the teaching of literacy in the middle or high school, and their project had to be multimodal, they still had tons of room to choose what direction they wanted to take and how they wanted to communicate their findings.

Aligning to 21c Literacy Standards

According to The NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies:

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

In order to more closely align the multimodal research project with these standards, I’ll need to do more than simply revise the project plan. I’ll also need to embed additional opportunities for the students to develop 21st century literacy skills and scaffold them towards the final outcome. Although students learned to contribute to a wiki throughout the semester, and I tried to expose them to at least one new Web 2.0 tool each week, we will need to spend more time learning how to create, as well as critique, a multimedia text. I plan to have student use Diigo, Google alerts, RSS feeds, and iGoogle next year in order to address the “managing multiple streams of information” standard. In addition, I intend to connect our classroom to other teachers and classrooms through online communities such as the English Companion Ning.

Flat Classroom Certification: Contribution and Collaboration

Flat Classroom™ Certification Series Intro

This semester, I’ve been participating in the Flat Classroom™ Certified Teacher Course, and the time has come to document all the work I’ve done on the 15 challenges, which are aligned to the 7 Steps to Flatten Your Classroom: (1) Connection, (2) Communication, (3) Citizenship, (4) Contribution and Collaboration, (5 and 6) Choices and Creation, and (7) Celebration plus two more challenges unique to us as educators – Global Project Design Essentials and Putting it All Together.

Contribution and Collaboration

One of the interesting outcomes of the the Flat Classroom™ Project design is that each student is involved in 2 distinct–yet connected–collaborative groups. The first of these is our face-to-face (F2F) classroom community; the second is the student’s international research team. Each member of their team is in a different geographical location, so the success of their efforts to construct a wiki page about their research topic is entirely dependent on the use of asynchronous, digital communication and collaboration skills. On the other hand, all of the students in my classroom are experiencing similar challenges as we move through the phases of the project together. This enables us to see each obstacle, not as a individual frustration, but as a collective learning opportunity. In the F2F classroom, students are able to mentor one another, ask each other for advice, and share successful strategies with one another.

The great thing about the collaborative classroom is that everyone in the room is learning from everyone else. The students are teachers, and the teacher is really just the lead learner. And in the Flat Classroom™ this is expanded to a global scale where hundreds of students and teachers are able to learn from and with each other.

Teachers as Connectors

Assessing Contribution and Collaboration

Successful online collaboration requires every member of the community to stay actively involved and make frequent, meaningful contributions to the conversation and the group project. The Flat Classroom™ Wiki Rubric describes optimal online interaction as:

• frequent communication with team mates
• being considerate of others and their ideas
• providing constructive feedback
• effectively communicating ideas
• meeting deadlines
• demonstrating organizational skills

In addition to using the rubric to evaluate a student’s overall performance at the end of the project, this list of skills and habits of mind are touchstones for classroom conversation, formative feedback, and student self-assessment along the way.

Additional Contributions

During my first experience with the Flat Classroom™ – while helping my students through the NetGenEd Project – I realized that the success of the project depended on a number of other committed adults, in addition to all the classroom teachers, acting as expert advisors and judges. At the end of that project, feeling like I had gain a good grasp of the basic steps needed to help teach and facilitate my students in participating, I promised myself that I would step up for additional responsibilities the next time.

This past fall, my students and I participated in Flat Classroom™ Project 10-3. In addition to helping my own students, I became the managing editor of the 10-3A wiki overall, plus the teacher reviewer for the WWW and Workflow Software pages, and the expert advisor to the Workflow Software  and Globalization & Outsourcing groups. I was glad to fill these positions, but in the future I’m thinking I’d like to be an expert advisor on a project different from the one my own students are participating in.

Another responsibility I took on was keeping the minutes from the Teacher Meetings up to date, and Vicki and Julie also asked me to host the October 29 meeting in their absence. This was a great opportunity for me to practice and improve my online facilitating skills. And thanks to Kim’s support with Elluminate, I was able to help answer my colleagues’ questions and keep our momentum in the project moving forward.

*Bonus: As part of this challenge, I also added a list of participating schools to the Flat Classroom™ Project page on Wikipedia.

Flat Classroom Certification: Citizenship

Flat Classroom™ Certification Series Intro

This semester, I’ve been participating in the Flat Classroom™ Certified Teacher Course, and the time has come to document all the work I’ve done on the 15 challenges, which are aligned to the 7 Steps to Flatten Your Classroom: (1) Connection, (2) Communication, (3) Citizenship, (4) Contribution and Collaboration, (5 and 6) Choices and Creation, and (7) Celebration plus two more challenges unique to us as educators – Global Project Design Essentials and Putting it All Together.

Digital/Global Citizenship

The more I integrate digital tools into my teaching, the more difficult I find it to imagine facilitating a class without them. One of the key reasons is that I’ve come to depend on the increased accountability and transparency afforded by making our work visible and accessible to each other (and to the rest of the world) online. When students post their work to their classmates (or an even larger audience) and I post my lessons on our class wiki, we hold ourselves to high expectations for quality and professionalism. Before I add the students as editors to the 21st Century Global Leadership wiki, I show them the Revolver Maps globe and FeedJit widget, just to be sure they realize that we get visitors to our site from around the world.

When we join the wiki, Ning, and Diigo communities for the Flat Classroom™ Project, we continue to discuss the standards and expectations for digital citizenship. I’ve been very proud to observe my students consistently set a great example of etiquette and respect for their peers. Sometimes, they even step up to teach the other students in the project about the things we are learning together in class. For example, Talia wrote a note to her group about copyright considerations with regards to the images being used on the wiki:

Hey group! One last note before I depart for Alabama, this is to everyone who has posted a picture: all images should be creative commons. This means they are non-copyrighted images, found at creativecommons.org, etc. If you didn’t get the image from creative commons you are stealing it (i.e. you are a virtual pirate). You need to link the picture to the website you got it from and include a caption stating the title, artist, and where you obtained it (e.g. Flickr). Have a great week!

And Emily gave her group some constructive feedback about formatting citations properly:

Dear group,
I have noticed that you are mostly doing a great job of parenthetically citing authors; however, many of you seem to be missing a crucial part of the citation process. Though an author is cited at the end of a sentence, there is no footnote or hyperlink to give the reader additional information or lead them to the original text from which the sentence is pulled. Please make sure to cite your sources completely.

One reason I think the students are such good stewards of digital citizenship is that we frame it in the context of global leadership. In the 21st century, it seems fair to say, you really can’t be a good global citizen without, in part, being a good digital citizen.

Classroom Monitoring Portal

Although I trust my students to uphold the digital citizenship expectations we discuss together in class, I do find a “classroom monitoring portal” very useful for seeing at a glance what all the students are doing and what’s happening in each of their different corners of the project. For the Flat Classroom Project, I created a FCP Classroom Portal on my Netvibes page where I could see each student’s activity on the Flat Classroom Project Ning, the edits and discussions taking place on each of their Flat Classroom wiki pages, and the latest bookmarks being saved to the Flat Classroom Diigo group. In addition, I created a Google Alert for each student’s research topic. They added these to their iGoogle start pages, and I added them to my Netvibes page as well. (As students learned more sophisticated and refined search techniques, they continued to modify their Google Alerts.)

Modeling and Mentoring

Just as I expect my students to help each other become better digital citizens, I try to help ensure that my colleagues are well-informed and able to reinforce the students’ positive growth as well. One critical area where professional development seems to be needed is around questions of intellectual property. Last summer, I created a video explanation of Creative Commons, which was used in an online training for my school district. I’ve also given workshops on Creative Commons and shared a collection of resources on the following wiki pages:

• Copyright & Fair Use Resources
• Copyright & Fair Use Presentations
• Copyright & Fair Use Video
• Creative Commons

Flat Classroom Certification: Communication

Flat Classroom™ Certification Series Intro

This semester, I’ve been participating in the Flat Classroom™ Certified Teacher Course, and the time has come to document all the work I’ve done on the 15 challenges, which are aligned to the 7 Steps to Flatten Your Classroom: (1) Connection, (2) Communication, (3) Citizenship, (4) Contribution and Collaboration, (5 and 6) Choices and Creation, and (7) Celebration plus two more challenges unique to us as educators – Global Project Design Essentials and Putting it All Together.

Communication Challenges

The communication challenges included connecting through professional organizations, using asynchronous and synchronous tools and mobile devices, as well as an online appointment scheduling service.

Professional Organizations

I’m a member of numerous Nings, first and foremost the Classroom 2.0 community, where I’m even the creator of the Google Apps for Education group, which has 455 members. The other nings I belong to represent my varied interests from English language arts, to global education, to the future of teaching and learning. I’m also a member of learning networks at Edutopia, PBS Teachers, and the Discovery Educator Network. As with all the blogs in my RSS reader, I seem to have joined more groups than I can keep up with. Perhaps it’s an indication of where I am on the “Stages of Personal Learning Network (PLN) Adoption” continuum (Jeff Utecht).

Stages of Personal Learning Network Adoption

I think I hit the “know-it-all” stage about a year ago, getting up an hour earlier to check for Twitter updates . . . but since then I’ve gained some new perspective on the journey. And after being almost completely “unplugged” during our two-week Winter Break, I’m now re-thinking which communities I want to be more involved in, and therefore, which communities I will need to give up.

I’m also committed to finding greater balance between consuming, commenting, and contributing to those communities. One of the great advantages of social media and Web 2.0 communication tools is the opportunity for many-to-many communication, and I want to do my part by helping to create those links in the networks I belong to.

Communication Tools

Participating in the Flat Classroom™ NetGenEd Project for the first time last spring, I definitely increased the number of tools I use for synchronous and asynchronous communication. I was already using Wikispaces and Diigo (social bookmarking), but with the Flat Classroom™ Projects, I began using TimeBridge to help schedule our weekly teacher meetings and Elluminate for real-time conversation with my global colleagues. The best thing about TimeBridge is its integration with my Google Calendar, and one thing I really like about Elluminate is the ability to play back the recordings if you miss a meeting or need to hear something again.

Since then I’ve also used agreeAdate for scheduling conference calls with my colleagues in the International Studies Schools Network, and another great free scheduling tool–Doodle–with my classmates in grad school. I’ve been using Google Chat and Skype more and more. In fact, this morning I was able to meet a new colleague via Skype who will be hosting me during an IREX Teaching Excellence and Achievement exchange to Alexandria, Egypt!

This year, we began using Google Apps for Education at The International School of the Americas. So I’m now using Google Docs daily for both synchronous and asynchronous purposes. In the classroom, I love the ability to look over each student’s shoulder and comment on their document as they’re working. In faculty meetings, we’re able to collaboratively generate the agenda, take notes, and create a shared “to do” list. And when we’re working on a project together from different locations, we use the chat bar in the shared document. But the asynchronous power of Google Docs is pretty great, too. We’ve used it to get student input and feedback in docs and forms, create presentations together, and coordinate projects in spreadsheets.

When we first begin a Flat Classroom™ Project, students typically assume that the only way they will be able to collaborate with global peers will be through synchronous communication tools. But I like to show them Wes Fryer’s model, which clearly shows that interactivity is not directly linked to synchronicity.

A Framework for Thinking Instructionally about Web 2.0 Tools

Mobile Communication

I have lots of educational apps on my iPhone: from news feeds to podcasts to TED Talks to reference apps. One of my favorite apps for keeping up with educational technology is eduTecher, and Open Culture has a great app for open education resources. Another great app for browsing and learning is Fotopedia Heritage with 25,000 photographs of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

But not all my students have smartphones. They do almost all have cell phones with unlimited texting plans. So the mobile educational trick I like to show them is how to get the definition of an unfamiliar word by texting Google (466453) with the message “define unknownword.” For my students participating in the Flat Classroom™ Project, we also set up Google Alerts for their research topics and add those to their iGoogle start pages.

Before walking students through the process of creating a portal for their Personal Learning Network (PLN), it’s important for them to understand the larger context and the purpose behind what they’re doing. That’s why I always wait until they’ve had a few days of experience with the tedious task of checking multiple pages on the ning and the wiki for updates. Then I show them the Common Craft “RSS in Plain English” video, and when Lee LeFever talks about “the old slow way” vs. “the new fast way” they can really relate! Once every student has created a start page, we make it a habit to start each class by checking them. I give students a few minutes to respond to their latest activity before sharing the day’s mini-lesson, and when they go into individual work timee, they already have it open, so they are never at a loss for things to read and do.