Global Learning

As Thomas Friedman, in The World is Flat, says, due to outsourcing and offshoring, along with help from the Internet, "the global economic playing field is being leveled".  People have been talking about the global economy for many years. We call for help with our computers, or our satellite TV and we end up speaking to people from India or Mexico. When I worked in commodity management in high tech in the 90's, I had to work with manufacturing plants on both coasts as well as in Canada, Germany and Spain and also Korea. 

Online learning allows people from anywhere in the world to attend classes together at SNHU and other universities. The Internet allows people to connect with each other instantaneously across the world.  Students can communicate with other students from across the world and learn first hand from the natives of the countries, rather than reading about places in books. Web 2.0 allows people to create and interact online.  Julie Lindsey and (my mentor) Vicki Davis created the Flat Classroom Project in 2006, which showed us how it could be done.   Unfortunately, that project has been terminated, (after I bought the e-book) but it is still a good guide and there are new projects that have spawned from it. 

Photo from Amazon.com

Being a connected educator allows teachers to connect with other teachers via Twitter, nings, and blogs.  Connecting to other educators can help you to find partner teachers with which to collaborate.  Skype in the Classroom connects teachers who want to collaborate on a project.  I tried last winter to set up a link between a classroom in my school and some other special education students in another state to play Mystery Skype, a 20 Questions type of game where the students using Skype try to figure out where the other class is from by asking yes-no questions, and using maps and their knowledge of geography to guess. Unfortunately, it didn't happen due to scheduling issues and the holidays, and then other projects took precedence, but I hope to try again next year. Our issue was trying to find a group of special needs students.  I think it would be easier with a regular elementary class. They even have a webpage to search for a compatible class and a Twitter hashtag - #Mysteryskype. I also recently read about Quadblogging, where you link up with three other schools to have students share blogs and comment on each other's blogs, one school at a time.  I plan to try to set that up for my information technology class next year.  I think that this would teach students both collaboration and communication skills as well as literacy skills.