Global Connections

I have been involved with several projects over the past two years that have connected students and teachers to other classrooms locally and globally. The first of these involved a staff member and her children who were traveling through Peru for two months. I helped the staff member establish a blog to help her "keep in touch" with folks back home, and arranged two Skype calls between her family and her two children's classrooms. In one of those classrooms the students were studying the rainforest and the family had just visited a rainforest in Peru! Since that time we have used those same tools (blogs and Skype) to connect with another family abroad (a Skype call to Ireland), a scientist in Brazil (Uncle of a student in the class) showing us some tropical creatures, a peer-to-peer blog connecting our students with another area school, and more.

Two projects I have facilitated this year have specifically been aimed at "creating global connections" between our students and students abroad. One of these projects was a grant-funded effort by another area school in which students and teachers were connected to share "Playgrounds Around the World." Two of our classes created narrated slideshows about our Primary School's natural playground to share with students in another Vermont School. The intention was to share with a school in Maine as well as one in Costa Rico, but unfortunately the timing was not right for all of the teachers. Our two classes DID connect via Skype with one other class to share their projects, ask and answer questions. The one "international" project I helped set up was a 5th/6th grade class who used their blogs to share with and learn about students in Sweden. In that case the teacher had established the contact through her own connections.

I have shared with teachers in my schools the resources on global collaborative projects, and with experiences like those described above as a start, I am confident that we will continue to see our students "connecting globally" using videoconferencing and web collaboration tools.