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:

1. Order the book                                                                                       Amazon   Barnes and Noble   Pearson Publishing     ebook format
2. Sign up for the book club - run by Ben Curran & Neil Wetherbee from @engaginged 
3. Mark your calendar with the dates and times

Thank you to everyone who has made this possible Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher
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 

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

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