The Journey to “Connected From the Start”

Eight years ago, I started out on a journey to open up my classroom and to connect it with the world.

Today is a big day in that journey. My book, Connected From the Start: Global Learning in the Primary Grades is being released as an eBook. The thinking, the writing, the editing and the reediting this book has required have been an interesting part of my journey. I’ve had to reflect in a way that I never have before. As this day has FINALLY arrived, I’m feeling a lot of different emotions: trepidation, excitement, satisfaction and hope.

Trepidation Every time I publish something on this blog, I wonder. I wonder what the readers will be thinking as they read it. I wonder how they will respond. I wonder if others will see the potential that I do. A book is a lot of blog posts worth of wonders.

Excitement I’m thrilled that there is now a resource available to help teachers who want to begin connecting their classroom. I often get emails from teachers who want to start their own journey in connecting their classroom, but aren’t sure where to start. I’m happy to reply, but you can only say so much in an email. I have always wished that a resource existed that I could point those teachers to. Now there is.

Satisfaction I’m satisfied that after a year and a half of hard work, there is a user-friendly resource for curious teachers—one full of colour, hyperlinks, pictures and video from my classroom.

Hope is by far the most powerful of the emotions I am feeling. I want those who read my book to understand the tremendous potential that there is in a connected classroom. I hope that I have written a book that will be helpful to those teachers in choosing tools that work well for any grade level, but especially for primary classrooms where our emphasis is on literacy.

I hope that teachers will use this resource to become connected and to realize the powerful potential of social media to transform their classroom from a closed community into a learning space open to the world and with a worldview.

I hope that because of this book, other teachers and classrooms are transformed the way that mine has been. I hope that other primary teachers can find ways to use tools such as blogs, Skype, and Twitter to open their classroom to the world.

I hope what I have written helps your classroom to be a connected place. If you want to go on this journey with me, you can find the book here.

My own journey with my classroom continues. I can’t wait to see where it takes us!

1st Look: Skype Group Video Calls

This article was originally posted on the Voices from the Learning Revolution blog of Powerful Learning Practice.

A couple of weeks ago, Skype announced they are now allowing educators free access to their group video calling. This would mean that in a call with multiple users, you would be able to see the video feed of all the participants. Previously, this feature had been restricted to premium users who pay for the service.

This sounded intriguing to me, so I went to my free Skype in the Classroom account and logged in to get the access code. I followed the instructions, waited 48 hours and voila! I had access to the service. The only thing left to do was to try it out. My primary students had learned so many things in past Skype calls. What would we be able to learn now?

With St. Patrick’s Day approaching, I had also signed up for Jennifer Wagner’s project to count the marshmallow shapes in a box of Lucky Charms.

I knew that other teachers on Twitter had also signed up, so I tweeted to ask if anyone wanted to join my class and count live together via Skype. A kindergarten class from Winnipeg, a grade three class from northern Manitoba, a grade one class from Surrey and a grade two class in Regina all decided to join us. When I got to school the next day, the teacher next door to me wanted to be part of it as well, so that made six classes for our group video call!

How did it go?

We planned to have a story, to count our Lucky Charms and to share our results via the group chat. One of the teachers also suggested that we could share our results using a Lino.it (which we did).

I have been using Skype fairly regularly for several years now. There are occasional hiccups, but we just hang up and try again. Five other classes instead of one other class meant five times as many chances for hiccups (and there were a few), but the class next door to me just came into our classroom instead (their video froze) and the one class that none of us could see could see almost all of us, so everyone was happy.

The counting took longer than anticipated, and several of the classes had to leave for various reasons. In the end, it was only my class and one other, so several of my students watched as they finished counting. In the end, we too ran out of time.

Fortunately, we were able to arrange a one to one Skype call with one of the classes the next day to compare our results. I know that other classes were able to work this out as well so that the opportunity for the students to share—the best part of the experience—could be maintained.

What did my students learn from this experience?

Counting and Sorting Skills – My grade ones counted the various marshmallow shapes and my grade twos counted the regular shapes.
Addition – The grade ones had to add each of their totals together to get a final count. This involved much higher numbers than they were used to using, but they used the strategies they had been practicing on numbers to twenty and were successful. The grade twos also used strategies they were practicing to help the grade ones and to add even larger numbers.
Estimating – In the end, there were just too many regular cereal pieces for the grade twos to count, so they used the piles of one hundred they already had and estimated.
Comparison – Comparing totals with the other classes.
Other Students Far Away Learn the Same Skills We Do – This important notion cannot be over-emphasized. It gives much more credence to your learning when you see other children practicing the same skills.
Sometimes Adults Problem Solve, Too – Again, it is valuable to learn that sometimes you need to try other solutions to a problem.

What did I learn?

Skype is a great tool – And the opportunity for educators to use the group video feature at no cost is a valuable one.
Planning is essential – In hindsight, we had planned far too many things for this call. Having many classes meant that people were not heard. A group call among three or more classrooms needs to be much better focused than a one-to-one call does.

The ability to have group calls has been available on Google+ for a while now, but I think many more teachers are comfortable using Skype as a tool than Google+. While our first experiment with this new free serve may have felt a bit overwhelming, we’ll definitely find great ways to take advantage of it. It will be a valuable addition to my connecting arsenal.

Skype on!

You Can’t Teach Literacy With Skype, Can You?

We Learn Best From People

I have a few grade two students in my classroom this year for the first time in half a dozen years. Since the last time I had a grade one/two split, the curriculum has changed. Naturally, I have spent time reading through the grade two curriculum. But when I have specific questions about what my seven year olds need to know, I don’t usually try to find the answer in the curriculum. I just walk across the hall and ask the grade two teacher. She explains it well and gives me the practical information that I need. She is also likely to add a few things I had never thought to ask that will help me to be a better teacher of that concept. Learning from her is much richer than the answer in the curriculum guide.

My students learn best from people as well. When some of the students wondered aloud about what it was like to move, I had some picture books handy, but the learning was far deeper when we asked a student in my class who had actually moved. Even the best book or digital program is no match for personal contact.

I’ve noticed this online as well. People often ask a question on Twitter that can easily be googled. I’ve done this myself. Somehow we feel more confident in an answer when another person is directly involved. We like to be able to question and push back. Simply put, we learn from best from people.

Because I want this best learning, we often use Skype as a learning tool. Skype connects us to people. I made the following video for my about-to-be-published book to show some of the ways we use Skype in our classroom. As always, my students say it best.

OK… But Literacy?

Skype is also one of the tools in my literacy instruction. The listening and speaking components of Skype are obvious ones, and we use it often that way. We learn about similarities and differences and ask and answer questions with others from far away. But, we have used Skype for more traditional literacy activities as well.

Many times, teachers or others have taken the time to read my class a story or poem via Skype. These experiences have introduced us to books and authors we would not otherwise have encountered and enriched our learning as a result.
People have been willing to listen to my students read via Skype, helping them to increase their confidence and their reading fluency.
We have done Reader’s Theatre with a class from Alabama.
We have shared reading strategies with another class, marveling that they used the same strategies that we did when working to improve their reading skills.
We have made reading connections with various classrooms. “Hey, we like that book, too!” or “we have a books by Robert Munsch in our library!” We have even learned a special silent hand sign to show we had made one of these links from the Kinderkids in New Hampshire. (We make a signed y with our fist and rock our hand back and forth in front of our chest—it saves a chorus of comments like the ones previously mentioned.)
Later this week my class will be making up some nonsense silent e words to see if some students in South Carolina can decode them. They’ll do the same for us.

Can you teach literacy with Skype? You bet. We learn best from people, and Skype connects us with people.

How Can I Get Followers For My Classroom Twitter Account?

Someone asked me this great question at a session I was leading this week. I don’t think I answered the question adequately, so I decided to put a better response here.

Who Do You Follow?

My first thought is that it is not who follows your class that is important; it is whom your class follows.

If you teach a primary class, you probably choose very carefully who you follow. Simply put, you want to select people or classes that you can learn from. My class follows some primary classes, including a class that tweets in French. I include this class to help my students see that other people actually speak and write this language that we practice together. We purposely follow only a few classes to help my students feel more connected with these students in other schools. We also follow Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut whose photos, videos and tweets are inspiring the world’s interest in space. We learn from everyone we follow.

We do not follow my children’s parents or educators I admire. Many of these people’s tweets would be beneficial, but most adults occasionally succumb to banal or snarky tweets about the person in front of them in the grocery line or worse. These are not appropriate for young children so we simply do not allow them in our timeline. I want our shared or individual reading time that includes the reading of tweets to be a learning time, so I make who we follow a matter of careful consideration.

Encouraging Others to Follow You

Despite what I just said about who you follow being more essential than who follows you, no one wants to tweet in a vacuum. Here are some suggestions for ways to help others to notice your class and what you are tweeting.

Make your class worth following. Ask your students what they like to read in tweets. Do they like to read sentences that all start with “I”? Would they rather read “we did math” or “we put cubes together to show groups of tens and ones”? This can be a great motivator for students to add details to their writing.
Add pictures or video links to students’ creations to some of your tweets.
Let the parents of your students know that you are on Twitter. Although we do not follow them, I do encourage them to follow us.
Show that you tweet. If you have a blog, you can put a Twitter widget in the sidebar to display what you have been tweeting. Go to your settings and then click on widgets. Twitter will set it up according to your preferences.
If you are on Twitter yourself, occasionally retweet good content from your classroom to let other teachers know you have a class account.
If you follow a class, but that class does not follow you, you can still interact with them. If you put @username in your tweet, they will see your question or comment on their mentions page. If a class enjoys interacting with you, they may follow you in return.

However you use Twitter and whoever you follow, Twitter can be an engaging and authentic literacy tool. I have written a book called Connected From the Start. It should be available by the end of March. It includes an entire chapter about using Twitter with little learners.

The best people I know to explain the wonders of Twitter in the classroom are my students. I’ll leave the last words about Twitter to them.

The Power of Hashtags For Me AND For My Students

I have had a classroom Twitter account for several years. We have used it to share what is happening in our classroom, to find out what is happening in other classrooms and to have conversations with those other classrooms. Parents and others have followed us to watch what we are doing and to be part of our learning. We have never been a “tweet every day” class, but went in fits and starts, much like my own Twitter use has sometimes been. Using and following hash tags has made a big difference to my own Twitter experience, and as always, if something works well for me, I think about the educational implications it might have. As I thought last summer about the things I wanted to explore with my grade one/two class this year, making better use of Twitter hash tags was one of them.

The first time we used hash tags this past fall, we were learning about the writing trait of ideas. We explored many sources of ideas ourselves, and then asked the people who followed us on Twitter to tell us where they got their ideas, using the hash tag #ideasforwriting. Classes and individuals responded, giving my students many more great sources for “what should I write about?”

On this, as on every other occasion, the giving nature of others on Twitter continues to astound me. My students were thrilled that people they had never met would help them with their writing and we eagerly added their suggestions to our classroom list of where writers get their ideas.
It was getting closer to Christmas by the time we revisited hash tags, and this time we were working on the writing trait of voice. After reading the story The Gingerbread Man, the students took pictures of their gingerbread men around the school and then tweeted about what the Gingerbread man might say using the hash tag #SaystheGBMan. A couple of other classes joined us, and the students laughed and joked as they set up their pictures, created their own tweets and read tweets created by others. Interestingly, during the process, the phrase “GBMan” became a saying in our classroom and the students now use it instead of saying “gingerbread man” in most of their speech. Along the way, all of the students showed me that they could meet the curricular outcome of writing using a different voice.

The week before the Christmas holidays, several classes from #1stchat were tweeting about Santa’s secrets–that is, things people generally do not know about the jolly old man. This was the brainchild of Karen Lirenman, who has done a paper version of this with her class for many years. What fun to make up humorous anecdotes about Santa and to see what ideas others had! Again, my students were fascinated to be part of a group of students who were all composing and creating tweets with their own ideas. (And meeting yet another curricular outcome at the same time!)

As with every form of technology, it is not the technology itself that improves the learning, it is the way that the technology is used. Harnessing the power of hash tags has really revolutionized my ability to learn on Twitter professionally, and now I know it can do the same for my students.

Salamanders, Toads and the Power of Connecting

I am so sold on the power of connected learning.

Earlier this month, Discovery Education had a special live broadcast about amphibians. I knew my students would be interested and Karen Lirenman, who teaches grade one in Vancouver, knew hers would be as well. Why not watch together, we thought, and compare our learning? Because of the time zone thing my class didn’t actually get to watch it live, and the plethora of special events in classrooms in December meant it was actually a week later before our classes got to connect to talk about the learning.

It was Karen’s brilliant idea to have the students take notes on whiteboards as they watched to help them to remember what they learned. Despite the fact that much of the writing was only readable if you were the writer or a grade one teacher, it did in fact help the students to listen and remember, and made them feel very grown up.

Later, we chatted with Karen’s class via Skype to compare our learning. What did you learn? Naturally, there were things both classes remembered, and things that only one did. There were also the “wasn’t it cool that…” moments as we talked about some of the things we had learned, like the fact that some amphibians freeze in the winter and then revive in the spring. Before the call, one of my students had said, “I have an I wonder for them”. (“Wondering” is one of the things we are learning to do in our classroom.)We had seen on Twitter that they were missing their gingerbread characters, and she wondered if they had been found. So at the end of the call, after we had exhausted the subject of amphibians, we also talked briefly about the disappearing gingerbread people from Karen’s classroom. The students were engaged in asking questions and in sharing their joint learning.

For me, though, the best part was right after we said “good by” to the other class. I asked my students if they had learned anything from the conversation. “Yes!” Would they like to learn this way again? “Yes!” “Why?” There were lots of answers, including “I can see what the kids look like” and “We can hear about stuff they learned.” My favourite answer, though, was from a student who looked at me as if I had asked a silly question and replied “’Cause you can learn more stuff.”

Learning through connecting with other classes just seems obvious to my students. And that feels right to me.

Why My Six-Year-Olds Have Digital Portfolios

This article was originally posted on the Getting Smart blog.

From the first week of school, the six year olds in my classroom begin to create an online presence in the form of a digital portfolio. We use a blogging platform to do this, and include artifacts that show their progress in writing, reading, math, social studies and science.

I am frequently asked why I do this. Even more frequently, I can see in a colleague’s eyes that they are thinking “why”, even if they don’t verbalize their question. The way that those educators have always done portfolios has worked well for them. Their students are learning the things they need to learn and are building a paper portfolio as they do so. Why do I take the extra time to upload those artifacts?

Audience

For any writer or creator, it is all about the audience. Why would a student even want to write on a piece of paper for their teacher to see when they could write on their blog for the world to see?

Because a blog allows comments, the students’ thoughts and learning can be not only read, but responded to as well. Students relish the feedback a comment gives, whether it is from a classmate, a parent, or someone they have never met. The audience becomes part of the student’s learning.

Creating a Community of Ripples

Having a blog creates a community around our classroom. The articles, podcasts, images and video we post are like stones dropped into a pond.

The first ripple in our circle of community is the circle of parents. Parents can watch their child’s blog and observe their child’s progress first hand. They don’t have to wait until our student-led conferences to see what and how their child has been learning. The growth is obvious for them to see.

The next ripple is the circle of the child’s extended family, friends and our local community. They, too can watch, encourage and interact. Often, this circle includes students who have been in my classroom in the past and who come back to our blog to comment and encourage the younger students.

The largest circle is—well—the entire world. We have received comments from many places including many states in the USA, classrooms across Canada, India, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and New Zealand. And those are just this school year.

That is a very large community.

Digital Footprint

Even at a young age, it is important to begin to have an idea of the significance of a digital footprint, including what things are appropriate to post online, how to protect your identity and ways to interact with others in an online space. As my six-year-olds grow up, the world will become increasingly digital. Tools will change, but connectedness will continue to grow. Children need to learn early that it is important to present yourself well online and some of the ways that can be done.

Their Culture

We teach kids that have no concept of a world without the Internet. Technology is a ubiquitous part of their world. They want and expect to use it at home. For me to deny that technology and what it allows them to do would be like asking someone from an earlier generation to learn without a pen or pencil. It just wouldn’t make sense.

Student Conferences

When we have student-led conferences in my classroom, my students use what is posted on their blog as the starting point of our conversation with their parents. Their moms and dads are already familiar with what is posted, and the students are able to focus on sharing what their goals were, what they feel they are doing well and what they want to get better at.

Student Choice

Allowing students to have some choice in what they create/post is important on so many levels. It empowers the students and involves them in their own learning. We teach students who have a plethora of choices as to how they spend their time. In addition to the choices children previously had, they can choose from many types of gaming, hundreds of television channels or video on demand. It only makes sense to give them a sense of choice as to how they show their learning as well.

An online portfolio gives those choices. Students can choose which of the many tools available will best help them to show their learning. Paper is not always the best way to communicate your ideas.

Joy

I will never forget the delight in one of my student’s eyes who had just had a working computer in his home the night before for the first time that school year. “Mrs. Cassidy, I showed my blog to my parents last night. I showed them all my stuff! They liked it!”

That moment of joy was worth the few extra minutes it takes to post my student’s articles online. I know that, although I don’t always hear about it, that moment is repeated over and over in the homes of all of my students, as they are able to share their learning with their parents at home.

Joy is the best reason I use digital portfolios with my young students. We can all use a little more joy.

Commenting With Pre and Emerging Writers

“For me? There’s a comment for me?” asked an eager five-year-old in my classroom, eyes aglow. I assured him that the comment was indeed for him and read it aloud to he and his classmates, pointing to each word on the Smartboard as I did so. He beamed as I read aloud, marveling at the fact that what he had posted on his blog was valuable enough to provoke a response from someone he had never met.

Ensuring All Students Receive Comments

When my students begin blogging each September, I ensure that they ALL begin getting comments as soon as possible. I hold a parent night and show the parents how to comment. I enlist the help of students who were in my classroom in previous years. Sometimes I have put out a plea on Twitter using the hashtag #comments4kids. I know how encouraging those comments can be, and I want all of my students to have that experience as soon as possible—to feel that rush of acknowledgement a first comment elicits.

Learning to Comment Ourselves

Soon after, I begin teaching my students how to leave comments themselves. With pre-readers and writers, this is a lengthy process! Sometimes we begin by going to the blog of someone who has just left a comment for us. Sometimes we begin by going to the blog of another classroom that is linked from our classroom blog. Wherever and whenever we begin, we always comment together as a group. (With pre readers and writers, this is not just good pedagodgy, it is a necessity!)

We start by talking about the comments we have received, how they made us feel and what was good about them. We want to be able to mimic the best of other people’s comments to us. Almost always, the students want to start by saying “I like your blog”. To help the students to stay on track, and to encourage them to think beyond this over-used phrase, we make an anchor chart to help us remember our discussion. (I first heard the term “anchor chart” from the Two Sisters. It refers to a chart that records a process or strategy and is created WITH the students in their own words. It is then posted in the classroom for the students to use as a reference.)

Commenting Together

To be honest, although this chart is made up by and with my grade one students each year, it does not change a lot from school year to school year. A good comment is still a good comment. Linda Yollis’ students have done some great work explaining how third graders comment, but for my pre and emerging writers, these steps seem to work best. Besides teaching them to comment, they reinforce other concepts my students are just learning.

Say something nice. What specifically did you like about the post? What made you smile?
Make a connection. What did it remind you of? Does it make you think of something you know or have done? Something you saw in a book or on a video? Understanding and making connections is a skill five and six year olds are just beginning to learn.
Ask a question. What do you wonder? What did the writer not include that you wish had been in the article? Understanding the difference between something you tell and something you ask is difficult for most six-year-olds. Including a question helps them to learn what a question is and how to think about someone’s ideas beyond their own.
Re-read your comment. This is a vital skill for commenters of any age. As the students realized how often they needed to change something we had written to make it better, we added this step at the end of our chart.

We follow this pattern pretty closely together for months as they learn the literacy skills necessary to comment on their own. The first independent student comments are often written from home. This year, the first student to comment on the blogs of his peers decided to be “fair” and left a comment for every other child in the class! I make a big deal about these comments, and as with every other comment we receive, we read them aloud together. After one or two students have written comments, the others start to want to do it as well!

Commenting Independently

It is usually near the end of our grade one year when I will actually officially ask all of the students to try making a comment on the blog of their choice. At first, I ask them to show me the comment before they click “submit”, but when they have shown me that they can do this independently, I let them comment on any of the blogs that are linked from our classroom blog, knowing that if there was ever anything inappropriate (to my knowledge there never has been), the teachers we are linked with would contact me. For students whose spelling skills are still developing, I stay close by and if necessary will write an editor’s note in brackets after their comment, in the same way I do with their blog postings.

Do they all follow the pattern that we have practiced together? No. It is a long journey. Learning to comment when you are an emerging writer does take a long time, but learning to read and to write also takes a long time. To me the result—a student who is beginning to understand how to interact with others in a social media situation—is worth the long journey.

Virtual Collaboration for Students: What’s a Primary Teacher to Do?

(This article was originally posted on the Voices from the Learning Revolution blog of Powerful Learning Practice.)

Are you are already convinced that your students need to learn how to connect, collaborate and learn with others online? Are you longing for your classroom to echo with the sounds of kids asking questions of others who live far away? Do your students have questions that only other children can answer?

When I talk to other teachers about the benefits of long-distance student collaboration, often their biggest question is: How do I find other classrooms to collaborate with? If you are already connected with other educators through social media, this part seems easy, but if you are just beginning your connected journey, it’s a very real problem.

If you’re still a little short on virtual teacher colleagues, I’d like to suggest three ways you can begin to connect.

1. Join an online project.

Many educators are starting online projects and want others to join them. These ventures require the least work, because someone else does all the organizing for you.

Thousands of other students stacked Oreos along with us.

I have recommended Projects by Jen (pK-6 focus) many times, but this fall was the first time I actually registered for one of her activities—O.R.E.O. 2011. Last week, my class counted and stacked Oreo cookies and watched them fall. Two other first grade teachers out of the hundreds of other classes who did the project contacted me. Our classes were able to connect via Skype to compare our highest stacks, lowest stacks and class average. There was also time for some of those weighty questions first grade children want to ask such as do you get snow there and do you have trees in Wisconsin? Jen makes it easy to participate in the projects and to pursue connections with other classrooms by providing the Skype names of all the participants and explicit directions for the task itself.

Two other newish projects for primary (and older) classes that I have not joined, but look interesting, are The Global Classroom (lots of participants at all grade levels and activities stretch ‘til June); and theFifty State Challenge (check to see if your state or country has been claimed—or start a fresh challenge yourself).

All three of these projects have been started by teachers who think that using the potential of the Internet to connect classrooms is important. They put hours of their own time into creating and promoting these resources so others can find out about them. Take advantage.

2. Skype in the Classroom

My class has had some very interesting conversations with other classrooms that we have met only through Skype. These initial calls have led to follow-up chats, and relationships have developed involving video sharing and cooperation that neither teacher originally intended.

Using Skype to Connect and Learn

A few years ago, teacher Wendy Goodwin contacted me about connecting first grade classrooms via Skype. Using this tool, our two classes explored ways our lives in Alabama, USA and Saskatchewan, Canada are the same and ways they are different. Later, we did Reader’s Theatre together via Skype, and both classes contributed videos to an alphabet wiki.

Skype now has an education site. It is free to join. Many teacher users have contributed projects that can be searched by a keyword, but if you are just starting out, you may want to go to the teachers section and search by first, fourth, kindergarten etc. This will bring up all of the teachers who teach a similar grade. Choose something that interests you and send a message explaining what you would like to do. If you don’t get a reply, try someone else. You have nothing to lose.

The benefit of this option is that you get to choose the topic of discussion yourself.

3. Twitter

Last year, when we were learning about what kinds of jobs people have, I put a question on Twitterwondering if anyone would be willing to talk to us about their jobs. Two people quickly responded. Brian Crosby, who was teaching sixth graders in Nevada, invited some of his big kids (well, they seemed big to my students) to tell us about jobs they have at home. A couple of days later, they chatted with us via Skype during their recess. From New York, fourth grade teacher Lisa Parisi skyped in to tell us about the jobs she and her daughter have when she finishes teaching each day. Once again, my kids were learning with real people about real things — and continuing to broaden their horizons.

After you’ve signed up for Twitter, a good way to begin to connect with educators who share your grade level and passions is to check hashtags such as #kinderchat, #1stchat, #2ndchat etc. (# is a hashtag and is used to collect tweets about a similar topic). Educators use these hashtags to pass along links or other information to online colleagues and to have regular synchronous meetings on Twitter. (See elementary teacher Patti Grayson’s post about this.)

Many of the best classroom connections I have made are with people I have met by following them on Twitter. Developing an online network of educators in this way takes time. If you persevere, though, you will have a ready source of support, ideas and limitless opportunities to connect your classroom.

If you have never connected outside of your classroom, choose one of the options above and make it happen. Jump in. Just do it. Let the global learning begin.

Cultivating Connections the Primary Way

(This article was originally posted on the Voices from the Learning Revolution blog of Powerful Learning Practice.)

Talking on Skype

One year on the first day of grade one, as we were thinking about our goals for the year, my students and I talked on Skype with three people who lived in different places around North America. These educators all told us what they had learned in their first year of school.

Before we made the first call, I explained what we were going to do. I’ll never forget Carson’s question: “Why would we do that?”

Why, indeed.

Just like their older counterparts, primary children love to connect with people from places around the world. Connections bring new perspectives, ideas, and learning in a way nothing else can. I could simply tell them that children everywhere on Earth play games and go to school just as they do, but when they are actually able to link with a class in Colorado or in New Zealand and ask questions themselves, the learning experience is much more powerful and lasting.

Our classroom blog is often the first way that we connect with people outside of our school. This year, each child posted an article on their personal classroom blog during the first week of school. To show them the connections that this blog could bring them, I invited people in my Twitter network to comment on one of the student’s blogs and to include their location. In my tweet, I included the hashtag #comments4kids. My mid-prairie six-year olds were amazed to find they had comments from places they’d only heard of — Texas, New York, Ontario. As we read each location aloud, it elicited a small collective gasp. Later we visited the blogs of a couple of other primary classrooms. I reminded them about how they felt when they received comments, and they happily helped me compose comments for their fellow bloggers in schools far away.

Building Global Awareness

In my classroom, group reading and writing activities often center on commenting or reading blog comments sent to us, building the children’s sense of membership in a global community. Comments that have been written directly to our class or to an individual child in the room are extremely meaningful text for young children, and engagement is high. Some of the most fun comes when the children begin to use their developing editing skills to find spelling or grammar mistakes in the comments from adults.

We often connect with other teachers, classrooms and “experts” using Skype. The students are astounded when they realize that while we are in school, it is the middle of the night for our friends in Brisbane, Australia. They marvel at the difference in our weather and seasons, and ask questions about why the students are all dressed the same and why they talk so funny. We use Skype to find out about mundane things such as what other people eat for breakfast or their Christmas traditions — or more extraordinary things like information about rocks and minerals from a professional geologist. Whatever the topic, these are all themes that support our grade one curriculum. The fact that we connect with others from around the world to learn these things gives the students an awareness of the wonderful diversity of the global family we are all part of, even as they learn science or social studies outcomes.

On some occasions, we have used wikis to collect information. We have asked people to contribute to our one thousand names wiki or our rituals wiki. We have collaborated with other classrooms to create a wiki of alphabet videos or a names wiki. We are fearless — we never say, “oh, we can’t do that, it’s just first grade.”

I am able to find people and classes to connect with my classroom fairly easily because I am personally connected to a network of educators online. This network has shifted over time, but is now centered mainly on Twitter. I am continually encouraged by the willingness to share, support and caring that educators display in that space.

By the end of the school year, all of my students, including Carson, can answer his question about why we connect with others from around the world. The simple answer is because we can learn from them.