Preparing Teachers for Global Learning and Collaboration

Audience Level: 
All
Institutional Level: 
Higher Ed
Abstract: 

The purpose of this presentation is to share instructional and learning strategies for preparing teachers to engage students in global learning and collaboration. The design of the online course for global collaboration will be shared along with specific resources for global collaborative projects.

Extended Abstract: 

Learning Goals:

  • Design an online course that promotes global collaboration
  • Select resources for designing global collaborative projects
  • Develop strategies for global collaboration such as video chats, blogs, vlogs, and online collaborative documents.

Graduate students enrolled in a course called Global Learning and Collaboration with Technology are prepared to connect with educators in other countries so they can support their students with the implementation of global collaborative projects. Most of the graduate students are K-12 teachers and some students are working in higher education and other organizations. The textbook adopted for the course is called Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration One Step at a Time by Julie Lindsay and Vicki A. Davis. The assignments in the course are based on the steps and challenges recommended by Lindsay and Davis and include online collaborative project participation and contributions. Detailed information about the course assignments and examples of student work products will be shared with participants.

Our graduate program is taught completely online so our students have already developed skills associated with using technology for learning and collaboration. In the opening week of the course, the graduate students are required to respond to a typical discussion to introduce themselves and in addition they are directed to describe any global experiences such as living or vacationing in other countries. I realize that not everyone has been to other countries so the graduate students are encouraged to think about other global experiences in terms of things they have learned about other places.

In the second module in the course, graduate students create a Connections Plan and a Video Message. The Connections Plan is based on Challenges 1, 2, and 3 from the textbook.

For Challenge 1, graduate students develop their Professional Learning Network (PLN). In the learning module, I provided several Connection Resources to help students develop their PLN.  The list provides a selection of organizations to help students get started with their connections. Examples of the Connection Resources include the following:

Global Education Conference: http://www.globaleducationconference.com/

Flat Connections directed by Julie Lindsay: http://www.flatconnections.com/

iEARN -  International Education and Resource Network https://iearn.org/

TakingITGlobal - https://www.tigweb.org/tiged/ - for Educators

TakingITGlobal - https://www.tigweb.org/ - for Students

Participate (formerly called VIF International Education)- https://www.participate.com/

For Challenge 2, the graduate students set up a blog to post information about their experiences in the course. For Challenge 3, students select two organizations they will find helpful and provide a brief description of what they learned from those organizations. Students then submit their first iteration of their Connections Plan using the Connection Planning Tool included in the textbook. This helps graduate students generate ideas about potential projects, potential locations, a description of what their students will do to gather information and participate in their learning, how they will communicate, and what they will do to create a learning legacy such as the development of recorded videos, digital stories, digital diaries, podcasts, or other products.

For the Video Message assignment, students complete Challenge 4 to communicate with new tools and create videos of themselves to share in the online course discussion. The purpose of the video is to provide another opportunity for students to introduce themselves and become accustomed to this form of communication.

In the next learning module, students participate in a discussion of Global Citizenship and develop what Lindsay and Davis call a Classroom Monitoring Portal. For this module, I provide Citizenship Resources that include an article from the Global Digital Citizen Foundation called Teaching Global Digital Citizenship? Use These 10 Essential Questions

https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/teaching-global-digital-citizenship-10-essential-questions

The excellent resources at the end of the article include the Digital Citizenship Agreements and the Global Digital Citizenship QuickStart Guide.

Another Citizenship Resource is called Teach UNICEF that includes Resources for Teaching Global Citizenship (scroll down to see the English version)

https://teachunicef.org/teaching-materials/topic/global-citizenship

See also https://teachunicef.org/sites/default/files/documents/units-lesson-plans/global_citizenship_gr_3-5_final_7-13.pdf

Another resource is the web site for the United Nations Sustainability Goals and of course this resource is valuable for many things in addition to citizenship.

The UN Sustainability Goals will help students think about significant problems of local and global significance and explore their perceptions and ideas about the problems.

http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

For the Classroom Monitoring Portal assignment, students use their RSS Reader to import URLs with links to student work in a global project. The purpose of a Classroom Monitoring Portal is to have a system for monitoring student submissions to the global project. Some examples of student submissions may be edits to a web site, file uploads, entries on a student blog, or posts in online chats. The Classroom Monitoring Portal will help with monitoring netiquette and student safety in addition to monitoring student progress. The portal will also help with providing alerts to new posts from students so teachers can follow up and provide comments and feedback for their students.

Because the graduate students in my class have not yet established a class of students with a global project, I have them use the links from the student blogs in our class to develop a “practice” monitoring portal. I model this assignment for them by using my RSS Reader to set up a portal with the list of student blogs from my course. The students then replicate what I have done in their own RSS Reader.

The next learning module is where students begin to develop more experience with collaboration in an online environment (other than the online course learning management system). Students develop their skills in using a web site for project contribution and collaboration. A web site is just one possibility for students to contribute and collaborate. Students can use other strategies such as working in Google Docs. For this assignment, I review the introductory posts from students and then assign them to small groups according to their professional roles. The students then work with their team members to develop a Global Learning and Collaboration Plan and post it to a web site.

The resources I provide for collaboration include the following:

Education Chats on Twitter: https://sites.google.com/site/twittereducationchats/education-chat-calendar

Eduhangout with Google Hangouts: https://sites.google.com/site/gpluseduhangouts/home

and an article from Educause called Connecting Two Worlds: Collaboration Between Higher Education and Corporate Learning: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2012/3/connecting-two-worlds-collaboration-between-higher-education-and-corporate-learning

In the final course module, the graduate students prepare their final Global Learning and Collaboration Plan, participate in a Reflective Summit, and participate in a synchronous communication/collaboration.

For the Global Learning and Collaboration Plan, students follow a template included in the textbook. Although students are not required to implement the project while completing this course, they are required to identify a specific person (or persons) who can potentially collaborate with them when they implement the project in the future.

For the Synchronous Communication/Collaboration, students are required to participate in an online conference. Students are required to participate in a presentation from another country, write a brief summary of their participation, and submit the description to the discussion thread in the course.

For the Reflective Summit, students use the online course discussion thread asynchronously. The students create a graphic to share with the class about their learning in the course. To help students create the graphic, I include an article for free tools for creating infographics:

http://www.creativebloq.com/infographic/tools-2131971

Online examples from the Reflective Summit graphics will be shared with OLC participants to demonstrate what graduate students valued most from the course, the most valuable resources graduate students found during the course, and descriptions of the Global Project Plans created by the gradaute students.

 

Conference Session: 
Concurrent Session 10
Conference Track: 
Teaching and Learning Effectiveness
Session Type: 
Education Session
Intended Audience: 
Design Thinkers
Faculty
Training Professionals
Technologists