Flattening the World One Classroom at a Time.

The Flat Classroom® Project is a global collaborative project that joins together students from around the globe. According to the Flat Classroom® Project “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, awareness of what it means to live and work in a flat world, while researching and discussing the ideas developed in Friedman’s book.”

At the end of September, the 4^th Grade classes began their participation in the Flat Classroom® Project known as A Week in the Life. In this project the students will cover the following essential questions:

1. What are the similarities and differences among children around the world?
2. How can we connect with each other through our commonalities?
3. How does your geography where you live impact your topic?

What is most noteworthy about this project is that the students will work in groups of kids from different schools to research on a week in the life of children in thier schools around the following topics:

• School time
• Languages & Clothing
• Housing & Transportation
• Leisure time
• Holidays & Celebrations

They will then make a collaborative project demonstrating their learning to others in the project. They will do this using various on and offline tools. One of these tools is the online collaborative tool and social networking platform known as Edmodo. Each class has begun the process by putting together a classroom “handshake” which was shared with other participants on Edmodo (see video below). What is great about this project is that it helps our students make more meaningful use of the technology already provided at AISG.

More information regarding this project can be found at the following URL http://aweekinthelife.flatclassroomproject.org/

The Flat Classroom idea has spread in the Elementary school and the Middle school, with

5^th Grade and a Middle School class are entering the Eracism project. This project is on an online debate about the following debate topic “Global management of natural resources will cause conflict between cultures”. Various tools are also used in this project but the main collaborative tool used is Voice Thread.

More information can be found about this program at the following URL http://eracism.flatclassroomproject.org/

It is great to see that our 1:1 laptop initiative is beginning to move towards deeper levels of integration. Way to go AISG!

The other Grade 4 classroom handshakes can be seen at the following URLs

http://video.aisgz.org/media/4b-handshake

http://video.aisgz.org/media/handshakeflv

Thanks for reading

Shannon Doak.

sdoak@aisgz.org