During one of my interviews early in my teaching career I was asked to identify five words to describe myself. I don’t remember all five words, but I do distincly remember three: leader, learner, collaborative. I value collaborating with others and think it’s an important for my students to do too. Despite indicating this early in my career, one simple Google search tonight made me realize that I’ve been sitting under the proverbial rock especially when it relates to online student collaboration.
Let’s take a step back before the Google search even happened. I was mulling over the readings for this week, and had clicked around on the Flat Classroom information. This year, for a couple reasons, I’ve been introduced to the Flat Classroom approach. A colleague of mine is taking the Flat Classroom teacher course so it’s been a topic of discussion and we also looked at running Digiteen at UNIS but it didn’t fly with the kids.
So, following this week’s instructions I googled “online collaborative projects for students“.
Whoa.
I didn’t realize that Flat Classroom represents the tip of the iceberg when it comes to online collaborative projects. I only sifted through page one of search results and realized there is a treasure trove of resources and projects that I had no idea existed.
Danmark O, Fohn Fjord, Renodde.70°N/26°W by Rita Willeart. CC BY
However, as I happily clicked away my elation started to wane. I just couldn’t seem to find projects that would work for my students in regards to content and age groups. Or, and this is a big one, the timing is not right. I wonder if teachers in other subjects (I’m a humanities teacher) feel the same?
In trying to stay optimistic, I do see a couple possible solutions to this:
- instead of focusing on content match ups, focus on skills match ups. For instance, the Flat Classroom’s eracism project develops research and debate skills, holding asynchronous debates via voicethread and synchronous ones later in the process. Very cool.
- propose a new project and see who joins in. Near the top of my search results, I found Global SchoolNet’s Projects Registry which “is the Internet’s oldest (1995) and largest clearinghouse for teacher-conducted global learning projects.”
Do you have any more solutions to add to this list?
Hi Kelsey
Have you seen ePals? That is the only other list of projects I know about. Thank you for sharing the Global SchoolNet Project Registry – I had not seen those.
I too have gotten excited about online collaborative projects while surfing online and each time my excitement has turned to inertia. I am not sure if I am giving up to easily or if I am underestimating the value of collaborating for its own sake. One issue is that I have yet to find a project that seems authentic — by this I mean that it is one that is based in the learning goals of a particular unit I teach. I have seen opportunities to join projects but the point of the project would be to join a project. Maybe getting students excited about online collaboration is enough of a goal, but I feel like my 6th graders have plenty of room to grow in terms of collaborating with their classmates. For example, my students really enjoy debating each other in person — we do not need to reach out to have debating partners.
Another factor for me is that our school is relatively diverse, so we do not need to leave our school to find chances to learn to understand and accept other cultures. We are currently working on helping students learn to accept each other’s lunch habits! Of course there is always more and more diversity out there but it seems odd to reach out to the rest of the world for the purpose of learning about cultures when we have so many unaddressed cultural issues right here.
Having said that, there are some areas where I would be thrilled to find projects that relate to our units of study. For example, I would be really happy to have my students work with students who are studying Paris or French (so would the French teacher I work with). I have also tried to reach out to connect with Palestinian and Israeli students but have not found an opportunity to do so. I wrote to some schools and they told me they had too much demand!
I hope to find an opportunity to experience this type of collaborating with my students some day soon. Now that we launched a 1:1 program this year access to technology is no longer an issue.
Hi Mary! I have not checked out ePals, but I will definitely add it to my list. Thanks for the suggestion.
I really agree with your statement about finding projects that are authentic, instead of “joining a project to join a project”. I think you captured some of my ideas in a more eloquent way. Equally important is your statement about the value of face to face. Your example of debate in the classroom is something I often experience as well.
Thanks for the input!