You're invited to the Book Club! 01/17/2012
 Global collaboration starts with connecting yourself to the world. Students are the greatest textbook ever written for each other. The same is true for teachers. We are passionate about connecting and facilitating effective collaborations between classrooms because we’ve seen the power of how it can engage students and teach them the skills they need to be successful in the 21st century. We want to bring in people who are nervous, who don’t know how, or who have tried to connect and were frustrated. We also want to bring back those teachers who tried it and got burned out. Now it is time to enlarge the circle of global collaborative excellence in a massive way. It is our vision that if we can have enough educators linking together and learning about this at the same time, that a natural byproduct will be the creation of many new, exciting global collaborations. It is time to get past the cute stories of global collaboration into the nuts and bolts of the pedagogy that makes it happen. (Although there are a lot of powerful stories to tell.) To help facilitate this conversation, we felt like that it would be best if we, the authors (Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis), step aside, and invite our friends Ben Curran and Neil Wetherbee of @engaginged to facilitate the conversation. They’ve done book clubs before and this is another pedagogy that we want to work out: that of having a book club that is truly global. We’d like to do this to promote conversations that transcend borders. The easiest way to get this out of the box is to get out of the classroom and connect with other educators. Every week for 10 weeks we will meet at an alternating time - 12 hours apart. (For the East Coast USA it is Sundays at 6 pm Eastern or Monday mornings at 8 am eastern - Visit our Book club calendar to convert these times to your Time Zone. Subscribe to this calendar via Google calendar to keep up with events.) This is Sunday evenings at 22:00GMT alternating with Monday mornings at 10:00GMT in our Blackboard Collaborateroom http://tinyurl.com/BookClubRoom .It is free and everyone is welcome. We’re also inviting the educators featured in each chapter to be with us for the conversations about “their” chapter. You’ll meet people from all over the world just like you who are doing wonderful, amazing things. This is a global story that transcends just one project, although we’re mighty proud of ours. While you are welcome to just “drop in” you can register with the Book club mailing list and we’ll remind you each week about the session, let you know who is coming, and we’ll mention any special events that we’ll be having as part of the launch. If you run your own book club, you’re welcome to come by the club anytime for ideas and discussion points. The hashtag for our conversations is #flatclass and the book club is, of course, free. Anyone can join us. There’s no homework - just conversation and learning. We’ll all be there to discuss the future of education with each other. We hope global collaborators from around the world will join us and share their stories too. Conversations will hinge around our new book, Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds. The book will be available in ebook format, although we’re not sure yet which ebook formats. So, to get ready:
Julie Lindsay@julielindsay Co-founders Flat Classroom Projects @flatclassroom Ben Curran & Neil Wetherbee @engaginged 4th and 5th Grade teachers Co-founders of Engaging Educators LLC How will this global book club work? Will it really transform my teaching? Have you ever read a book about teaching and thoroughly enjoyed it, only to get done and ask yourself "Now what?" Or maybe you've read something that was motivating, inspirational and chock-full of ideas, only to find after sharing it with colleagues that they "just aren't that into it?" If so, this book club is for you. We hope it will be a gathering of inspired, motivated, similarly driven friends from around the globe. Here's how it will work...each week we will focus on approximately one chapter. Each meeting will be divided roughly into three parts. The first part will focus on implementation--how all of us have or can implement the main theme of the week. We'll also dive into and discuss the activities (Vicki and Julie refer to them as "challenges") that are embedded in the book. The second part will be more of an open forum for everyone to discuss other topics in the chapter or other issues pertaining to the subject. This will be a great time for making connections with other teachers for possible collaborations and getting answers to questions that you have. Finally, and perhaps what we are most excited about is that each week we hope to be joined by the friends mentioned in each chapter. They will be able to share their firsthand insight on the weekly topic as well as stories from their own experiences. On top of all this, Engaging Educators will be providing short, free “boot camp” style webinars along the way to help you master some of the topics that might be new to you. What we hope to facilitate is a perfect companion to Julie and Vicki's book, an experience that goes beyond "just reading" and demonstrates what a network of connected educators can learn and accomplish. Welcome to the club! Ben Curran & Neil Wetherbee @engaginged 4th & 5th Grade teachers and Co-founders of Engaging Educators LLC technorati tags: flatclass engaginged bencurran neilwetherbee coolcatteacher julielindsay Add Comment Enlightened Digital Citizenship 10/20/2011
The components of an effective social bookmark. Social bookmarks are like shared notecards on a topic you are researching and are part of pre-writing. Keep in mind that a good wiki page has good contextual hyperlinks - you need to know ahead of time what these hyperlinks are going to be. 1) The bookmark itself. This is only part and is not enough to consider it "social" bookmarking. 2) Summary (Description) - This is a memory jogger. You should be able to look at this like a notecard and have your diigo library up and able to look at it while writing your wiki and not have to go back to the individual website for more data. If you have to go back then you probably didn't do a good job on notecard - or - you're plaigarizing. The summary should typically have two things -- a summary/ memory jogger/ also notes to the other people reading this bookmark (this is an important part of what we're saying or I like the video on this presentation.) and it should also have a good quote if you want to quote the article. 3) Send it the Group If you don't send it to the group they don't see it. This is the process of "vetting." If you just used our tags in the general diigo area, we could start getting "spammy" stuff of people promoting their products. We are a learning community studying digital citizenship together and have agreed to work together. 4) Tags - These are labels used to organize topics and help you. Most bookmarks have two kinds of tags. a) Standard Tags - We agree upon tags for our assigned topics. This helps us share information between each other. I can look for everything tagged with my topic and find other things that my partners in the learning community have found on that topic. This is called taxonomy. Your teacher may also have everything bookmarked by students at your school use the school's official tag just to find them. b) Personal Tags - I can create personal tags for every topic just to make life easier for me. I could use the tag important or I may see that subtopics are emerging, so for example, I may find a video on sexting but it is part of digital_safety or privacy - I might add sexting as a topic. If enough people use this method then we can see patterns emerge in our topic about what our research is finding. This is called folksonomy. It is meaning that emerges when a lot of "folks" work together.  Announcing the formation of the Digiteen™ Project for September 2011. This project will follow the project subscription model established last year for the Flat Classroom® Projects. “Digital citizenship is understanding effective, safe behaviors online that consider long term consequences and give students a method for understanding how to make decisions as new technologies and trends emerge at lightning speed,” says Vicki Davis, classroom teacher and co-founder of the Digiteen™ Project. The goal of the Digiteen™ Project is to create and maintain best collaborative projects and collaborative workspaces for preteens through high school and educators serving those students while building global bridges between students, educators, teachers-in-training, and higher education institutions. It is a global collaborative project that provides an opportunity for students to not only talk about digital citizenship, but experience via online connection, collaboration, shared research and presentation. It also has an action project component where a classroom designs an action to be carried out in their own school community and then shared back to the global partnership. An annual school subscription per project will provide for 15 students in a Digiteen™ Project. For any students above this number or for additional projects, a per-student fee is applicable. The project site will include the ability to embed video, blog, make groups, have discussions using forum posts, and it may be used for other activities for the class during the year. In order to help meet the subscription price, teachers can apply for a limited number of sweat equity positions. These scholarships will be available to cover the cost of per student fees on an application basis. The vision is to allow teachers to provide administrative support for the project such as RSS monitoring on the project portal, serving on project leadership committees, providing troubleshooting responses, and other activities in order to defray the administrative overhead costs of running the project. The application deadline is September 15, 2011. For more information about Digiteen™, including access to the online application, please see http://www.digiteen.org/ We invite you to send any inquiries to fcp@flatclassroom.org Watch this space for more announcements of new projects coming, including the repeat of the popular ‘Eracism’ Project, as well as an opportunity for educators to join our next Flat Classroom® Certified Teacher course, also starting in September 2011. Also, our book, ‘Flattening Classroom, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration one Step at a Time’ is due for release January 2012. Find out more at www.flatclassroombook.com This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar. Calling Virtual Participants 02/07/2011
We are looking for students and educators who are interested in joining us virtually for the Flat Classroom Conference 2011, to be held in less than 3 weeks time. All details on the wiki at http://conference2011.flatclassroomproject.org/Virtual+Participants There will be TWO online meetings in the next 2 weeks to discuss this further. Come and join us! If you have students who are interested please let us know and encourage them to sign up. The first information/ training meeting is tomorrow morning, Tuesday February 8, 2011 at 7am Eastern with Julie Lindsay. Press Release August 29, 2010: Flat Classroom(tm) Directors, Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis, are excited to announce the new project subscription model forFlat Classroom(tm) Project,Digiteen(tm) Project,NetGenEd Project andEracism(tm) Project. Our goal: To create and maintain best global collaborative projects and collaborative work spaces for students and educators in and serving K-12 around the world while building bridges between Students, Educators, trainee teachers and Post Secondary Education Institutions. Digiteen(tm) Project An annual school subscription will provide for 15 students to be entered into a project. Any students above this, or if the school or class wish to enter another project, a per-student fee is applicable. Site includes ability to embed video, blog, groups, forum posts and may be used for other activities for the class during the year. In addition we are introducing “Sweat Equity” for teachers. This means that some scholarships will be available to cover per student fees on an application basis. This allows teachers to provide administrative support for the project such as RSS monitoring of the project portal, serve on the project leadership committee, provide troubleshooting response, and other activities that will defray the administrative overhead costs of running the project. This is over and above the monitoring that teachers are required to do of their own student work for each project. Included services and websites (leading Web 2.0 tools) (If you had to buy these tools for your school it would cost over $4000)
Further developments:
Questions? We love to hear from interested participants and classrooms globally. Email: fcp@flatclassroom.org Flat Classroom Project and Digiteen News 07/14/2010
NEWS Update Vicki and Julie were very busy at ISTE last week with various presentations and sessions including a 7-hour DigiTeacher Workshop, Flat Classroom ‘Birds of a Feather’ and the ‘Seven Steps to Flatten your Classroom’ presentation that was attended by over 200. Flat Classroom Workshop, St. Louis St.Louis. July 13-14, 2010 http://flatclassroomworkshop2010.flatclassroomproject.org/ Special announcement! The Flat Classroom Project 10-3, running from September - December 2010 will be our 20th global collaborative project since joining classrooms together using Web 2.0 tools in 2006. We are delighted to announce David Warlick, one of our main sources for inspiration and a supporter of our projects and events, will be creating the keynote for this project. Consider joining your classroom today, applications close September 1, 2010. Flat Classroom Conference 2011, Beijing, China February 25-27, 2011 The NEXT Flat Classroom Conference is in Beijing, February 25-27, 2011. Join us at the W.A.L.L. - We All Learn and Lead in China! The Flat Classroom™ Conference is a unique limited-seating conference including students and educators to envision the future of education as they use leading technology tools such as wikis, blogs, social networking and multi-media storytelling. The conference is diverse in participation while allowing smaller groups with leading world-class presenters in a "flattened" environment where virtual participants join in the conversation from remote corners of the world. Educators will leave the conference understanding how to collaborate globally and with contacts in hand to start projects. Students will leave the conference with leadership skills, technology skills, presentation skills, and a better understanding of diverse cultures and collaboration. Educators come and join the Leadership Workshop! Teachers apply to bring students to the Student Summit and allow them to be challenged to find a voice while collaborating with others from around the world. Early Bird registration until September 15! All details, including online Registration at http://www.flatclassroomconference.com/. Are you interested in sponsoring a Flat Classroom Workshop or Flat Classroom Conference? A range of sponsorship opportunities are available to ICT and education vendors as well as other companies and individuals interested in supporting the event. See http://www.flatclassroomconference.com/sponsors.html. Announcing New Projects We are delighted to announce the re-opening of applications for the Digiteen Project 2010-2011. Each project is offered three-times per year and runs for 8-10 weeks. The Digiteen™ Project is a global hands-on project for middle and early high school students, (typically Grade 6-9, 11-15 year old). This project studies digital citizenship with students researching current topics, writing a collaborative report on a wiki, and performing and documenting offline action educational projects to promote effective digital citizenship at their local schools. Topics of study include digital: access, communications, literacy, security and safety, etiquette, rights and responsibilities, law, health and wellness, and commerce. 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, ‘The World is Flat’. Projects are constructed with an international set of classrooms (as mixed as we can make it depending on applications). Students also have the chance to interact with expert advisers and other classroom teachers and sounding board classrooms in a true flattened learning mode. Information about the project can be found at http://tinyurl.com/flatclassroomguide Application form found on the Apply tab of http://flatclassroomproject.net. Read more details on the New Projects Wiki. Information about the project can be found at http://tinyurl.com/digiteenguide Application information is found on the Apply tab of at http://www.digiteen.org/ Applications close September 15 for the Digiteen 10-2 project. Watch this space for further announcements coming about:
Download our 2-page brochure to share with others http://www.flatclassroomproject.org/file/view/Flat_Classroom_Brochure_July2010.pdf What are others saying about Flat Classroom Projects, Conferences and Workshops? http://www.flatclassroomproject.org/Flat+Classroom+Participants+Speak+Up Is there a Flat Classroom in your future? “We are building bridges between students that our future can walk across”. Digiteen co-founders Vicki Davis and Julie LIndsay and Pennsylvania Public School teacher, Suzie Nestico, have been featured on the Microsoft Internet Safety website for their work with the Digiteen™ projects. "We're excited about sharing the story of Digiteen and having students research the facts about Internet safety and take action to educate their peers about how to be safer on-line," says Davis. "They are largely responsible for their own Internet culture and this helps them get the facts in a way that promotes change in their on-line habits." These brochures can be downloaded from Microsoft's Internet safety website or below:
Written by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay http://netgened2010.flatclassroomproject.org/ Award winning author, Don Tapscott, and award winning global collaborators Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis (co founders of the Flat ClassroomTM Project) are excited to announce the 2010 NetGenEd Project, another global collaboration to envision the future of education and social action by inspiring today's students to study leading technology trends and create their vision for the future. This is the second NetGenEd Project collaboration between the two organizations with the 2009 project announced at the Flat Classroom conference in Doha Qatar 2009. The 2009 Net Generation Education Project was the replacement for the Horizon Project and included 10 schools with more than 300 students. The application process is now open for schools who wish to participate in the project in March - May of 2010. In this project, students will study and "mash up" the results of the 2010 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium and Educause and Tapscott's book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World. Students will study the current research and create wiki-reports with their student partners around the world analyzing current trends and projecting future happenings based upon this collaborative analysis. This project is managed by the students who assume roles such as project manager, assistant project manager, and editors of the various wikis. After compiling their wiki reports based upon current research, and encouraged by "expert advisors" (subject matter experts in the industry), students will then create a video in one of two strands. Video strand I competition will be the NetGenEd Challenge where students are asked to envision the future of education based upon current global technological trends. Video Strand II Competition is the Macrowikinomics Challenge where students envision the future of global social action based upon their research in current global technological trends. The video challenge will be also be open to the public for submissions beginning March 1st. "We are particularly excited about this year's project because we're not only asking students to envision the future of learning and the classroom but also how this media can be used to impact and improve society itself. This generation is the Net Generation and they are uniquely suited to speak for themselves in casting a vision for their own future," says project organizer, Vicki Davis. This project is unique in that Tapscott will interact with students in forum posts throughout the project as they discuss Tapscott's research into NetGen and also current research as being compiled for Tapscott's forthcoming book (being written with Anthony Williams) MacroWikinomics. Additionally, he will keynote the project via a Youtube video released in March along with a student keynote to be recorded at the Flat ClassroomTM Mini-conference at ASB Unplugged in Mumbai, India in February. Additionally, the Discovery Educator Network is going to host a series of webinars demonstrating how to tell a compelling digital story as well as leading a book club group for educators related to the NetGenEd project. The Flat Classroom Projects are global collaborative projects organized by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay and sponsored by Elluminate. If you are ready to have your students collaborate globally and follow the best practices as used in the award winning Flat ClassroomTM, Horizon, and Digiteen projects fill out this form before February 12th and apply now!. Digiteen 2010-1 Forming 12/10/2009
We are in the process of planning and forming our Digiteen 2010-1 and 2010-2 projects and calendars have been updated to represent the plans for next year! Now is the time to discuss and plan how your school will teach and promote digital citizenship and 21st Century Character Education! To receive information, submit an application form or Contact Us! | Project Announcements
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