“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”  – Mary Oliver, from the poem, “The Summer Day”

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”  – Margaret Mead

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
- attributed to Goethe

Beginnings

We’ve begun.  Today is the second meeting of a global education workgroup at Gravelly Hill Middle School in Efland, NC.

Our first meeting on March 4, 2009, was designed to assess the level of interest in global education.  In attendance was my principal, two language teachers (Spanish and French), a 7th grade social studies teacher and myself.  Our district technology director has expressed an interest, but was not able to make the first meeting.

Our goal was to share our initial ideas on global education and brainstormed for the next steps.  To get us started we looked at the following:

1. An example of a mature international schools program:  International School Partnerships Program from the Center for International Understanding at UNC.
2. An example of a global service learning  project:  The Global Run Project

A question arose:  How shall we begin?  The writings of Cool Cat Teacher on her experience starting the Flat Classroom Project with Julie Lindsay provided some initial guidance.  We believe it is important to identify, make contact and establish a long-term connection with another teacher or school first, before we connect our students.

Our initial answer to establish a sustainable connection is to use the shotgun approach, which in our case would be to collect emails to as many potential contacts as possible.  We’ll be compiling our potential contacts in a google spreadsheet.

The intention of this blog series

I’ll be recording the progress of our group after every group meeting by reflecting on our process in this series of blog articles.

We live in a world hurtling toward the future. While I was sleeping (focused on creating what I thought would be a cutting-edge middle school biotechnology curriculum) the world of education was being transformed by innovative collaborations of educators across the globe with:

1. WikiSpaces allows teachers and students to collaborate on educational projects across the globe, an award-winning example is The Flat Classroom Project
2. Edublogs provides teachers with a free blogspace. An examplary blog for keeping up with the latest instructional technologies is The Infinite Thinking Machine
3. SlideShare allows you to share powerful educational presentations like the Shift Happens slide show shown above.
4. Google Presentations allows multiple authors to create dynamic presentations online, A collaborative Google Presentation on Using Google Presentations
5. DivShare provides unlimited storage for creating a repository of instructional multi-media.
6. FlashMeeting is for video conferencing with other educators across the globe. This free web-based tool also automatically archives your conversations for asynchronous review.

The following is a TeacherTube video on the same topic. It contains the same content as the slideshow, but provides more thought provoking questions for teachers, parents and school administrators.

Download Video: Posted by mcleod at TeacherTube.com.