I had an interesting experience tonight. My friend and technology guru Chris was presenting at an education conference in Australia and he asked me to help him with his presentation by joining him for a Skype video conference. He was sharing with his audience my experiences with the Flat Planet Project last school year. It was only last year that I started to get interested in incorporating technology into my classroom and now I am helping to present at a conference about this very thing. It really blows me away. Furthermore, with a simple yet marvelous piece of technology like Skype I was able tonight to share my experiences with a group of teachers on the other side of the planet! The world is flat! Hopefully some new connections will come of this and more great learning experiences for students. If you were at Chris’ presentation and you are interested or know someone who would be interested in some online collaboration with an R.E. class in Canada please leave a comment.

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Flat Planet
Online Collaborative Proecjts

To close up the Flat Planet Project Neil and I were interviewed by Chris Betcher for his Virtual Staffroom Podcast. We had a great conversation about the project and web 2.0 in general and the incorporation of technology into the classroom. When thinking about our conversation it made us realize that the world really is flat considering this was a three-way conversation between three educators on three different continents. I’m sure Neil and I will be thinking and talking about what we will do next. Furthermore, we would like you to join us. We would love for our next collaborative project to reach beyond our two countries. It would be great to have a third or even fourth country/continent join us for the next project. After all, as I have said before the word catholic means universal and we would like to make our next project a truly catholic one.

catholic education
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Turbo Tagger

This is just a follow up to my previous post. The Flat Planet Project has been receiving much attention. This has come somewhat as a shock and surprise to Neil and I. We are really encouraged by the positive feedback we have been receiving. Thought I would put the links in here to some of the comments that people have been making.

My techno/web2.0 guru Chris Betcher discussed our project on his Betchablog

A post on Teaching 2.0 on Making Gloabl Links

Julie Lindsay whose Flat Classroom Project (along with Vicki Davis) was an inspiration for our project wrote about the project on her E-Learning Blog

Mark Wagner at Educational Technology and Life

A Jewish Edu-Blogger in Jerusalem commenting on a project by two Roman Catholic religious education classes in Canada and the UK. Now if that isn’t proof that the world is flat I don’t know what is!

A Web 2.0 Blog that thinks we have made a “Wonderful Wiki”

Neil and I will also be guests on an upcoming episode of the Virtual Staffroom Podcast hosted by Chris Betcher.

Well I have been away from my blog for the past couple of weeks while I devoted my time to the Flat Planet Project that my class collaborated in with Neil’s class in London, England. In this post I will share my reflections on the project.

I first got interested in online collaborative projects and using wikis and blogs last autumn when I “attended” the K12 Online Conference. I viewed presentations on wikis by Vicki Davis and Mark Wagner, and one on collaborative learning projects by Sharon Peters. These really motivated me (along with many other presentations “there”) to explore Web 2.0 tools and to think about how I could improve my students’ classroom experience with these tools.

The thing that struck me most about the project was the level of engagement I saw. As soon as my class got into the computer lab they eagerly got to work on their task. My other grade 12 class were doing the traditional project that I have previously done with this course and they have needed the traditional reminders about not playing games etc. while in the computer lab. I am amazed by some of the things that the students have done with their project pages. One of my students said the fact that we had a global audience was motivation for her to work hard on this project. Another student’s jaw dropped when I told them that they would be partnered with a class in England for this project and she said “that is so cool.”

And now for a shameless plug. I got an email from one of the guys who runs the Wikispaces website. He said, “Your space is a great example of trends we’ve been noticing in education.” And with that he told me that the Flat Planet Project had been named the Wikispaces Space of the Month for April. There are over 25,000 education wikis on this site.

If you are interested in online collaborative projects check out this link. To see some examples of other online collaborative projects check out the Flat Classroom Project, The Horizon Project, Youth Bridges and there are many others.

Neil and I have already begun to discuss where we will go from here. We would love to include another class, or two, for another Catholic collaborative project. We would like to perhaps include a class from Australia and Africa. After all the word catholic means universal! If you are a Catholic religious education teacher (anywhere really) and would be interested in collaborating Neil and I would love to hear from you. Please leave a comment.

Flat Planet
Web 2.0
Collaborative Learning
Catholic Education
Turbo Tagger