From Create the Future Workshop Comes a Project

If someone were to pitch to you a globally collaborative project for your students, what would be your first question?

Last weekend, I participated in Create the Future: Become a 21st Century Learner workshop led by Kim Cofino and Julie Lindsay. The well-organized, thought-provoking activities and the people there made for an excellent workshop. I spent two days in a small team of four. (A quick shout out to Heather, Ben, and Richard. I’ll get my stuff on the wiki soon. Promise.) We all worked in teams to create globally creative projects to take back to our respective schools. This wasn’t an academic exercise. It should fly. But one question pestered me throughout the two days. How can I justify participating in a globally collaborative project?

The standard answer here goes something like, “Students should participate in globally collaborative projects to sharpen their collaboration skills, gain awareness of different perspectives, and learn to be creative problem solvers in today’s connected world.” I get that. But when teachers tell me they don’t have time to participate in a globally collaborative project, I get that too. It’s not, however, really about being too busy. It’s about reaching learning goals before the unit is up and we’re on to another one. That NETS•S talk about connecting, creating, and collaborating is all fine but this current unit of inquiry is the real deal. We have learning goals. How can that project take my students closer to taking action on their inquiries? That’s what it’s really about.

A globally collaborative project should take students closer to their learning goals in ways that they could not do otherwise.

Our project focused on the upcoming grade 5 exhibition. Since all of us except Heather, a grade 3 teacher, have exhibitions coming up it seemed a natural fit for a collaborative project. (Heather participated in the planning of this project even though it would not be one that her students could join. Thanks Heather!) In a nut shell, it’s about opening up reflection. Students reflect on their learning experiences and share their reflections with teachers, classmates, and fellow exhibition students at BISS (Ben) and SSIS (Richard). Why bother? Students can share with each other in the classroom. And how will this project generate better reflections and create a better reflection experience? In the past, reflections were hand written in notebooks and shared mostly with teachers and sometimes with classmates. Pretty closed. Why open reflections? Why share with others? If this project is going to fly, we have to answer those questions and build the project upon those answers.

Here’s what we came up with. We believe that sharing is learning. And that students sharing with students in other schools will draw out from students more meaningful reflections because they will connect with students based not on proximity but common interests. And here’s what this reflection sharing looks like. We have a home base. It’s a VoiceThread group. Students create their reflections on VoiceThread and then share them with student groups formed around a common interest, maybe a line of inquiry. Students view and listen to the voicethreads that resonate with them the most. They then comment on the reflection. Ideally, it is a thoughtful comment that helps the author move forward. And maybe the reflection reveals to the viewers something new and useful as well. The aim here is to form a community of learners who work together to move forward together. That kind of experience, I believe, is more meaningful and sustainable than one that can be achieved without such collaboration. But I don’t know and I’m very eager to find out.

I’m going to pitch this idea to the grade 5 team next week. Their first question will probably focus on how is that better than what we are doing already. Good question. I’ll tell them creating situations for students to follow and act on their interests is creating inquiry-based learning experiences. If we want students to deepen their engagement in their reflections, then we want them to connect with authentic audiences that matter to them. Maybe they can get that right in their own classroom. Great! But maybe they can’t. Ultimately, we need to make sure they can get a learning environment that fits. In this case, an open and collaborative approach will let that happen. Do you think it will fly?