A Global Classroom is Born (by Deb Frazier)

A Global Classroom Is Born!
Will your class be a member?
global classroom
Our Beginnings

The Global Classroom was born in the minds of Deb Frazier’s (@frazierde) young students:

Our first grade class [in Ohio, USA] was thinking about the ways people around the world meet their needs. We began to do some research, diving into books about various cultures.

While sharing new learning about India, Puju, whose family is from India, commented, “My dad says that’s not really true.” From there we knew we needed more than books. We needed to talk with people in other cultures to really discover the many ways in which they meet their needs.

And thus, the Global Classroom came to be … Deb published a blog post on Primary Perspective, and shared it on Twitter … bringing together 6 teachers from 5 countries, and leading the creation of an amazing global project.

“Through Twitter, we worked collaboratively to connect our classrooms using one single VoiceThread. To date, this VoiceThread has had over 1,000 views and nearly 200 comments from kids all around the world! Not too bad for a project which was developed and ran for only four weeks due to the end of the American school year!

The power kids felt in being free to question their learning gave them ownership and motivation. The questions and the voices of children gave Global Classroom authenticity. VoiceThread and the Global Classroom Wiki made a powerful impact on kids around the globe!”

A New Direction

After the completion of our 2011 project wiki, organised by Michael Graffin (@mgraffin) from Perth, Western Australia;  thoughts turned to the future … Where would we go next? Would we find any other teachers interested in joining? What projects might we run? We created a Google Doc, and shared the link on Twitter … and were quickly overwhelmed with the response.

We have since welcomed no less than 100 Kindergarten – Grade 12 teachers from 18 countries (across 6 continents) into the #globalclassroom community; and now find ourselves on the cusp of the biggest project of our careers.

Our Vision for 2011-12

We envisage the “Global Classroom Project” as an online learning community; providing the collaborative spaces, resources, and global network to enable teachers and students to share, learn and collaborate on a global stage.

As revealed in our Manifesto, we believe the Global Classroom Project has incredible potential to promote cross-cultural understanding, develop teachers’ expertise with technology and global projects, and enable our students to communicate and connect on the world stage.

We represent a broad, global group of educators – working together in primary (elementary) and secondary teams. Some are keen to share and build their global project ideas, while many are looking forward to participating in their very first global project / cultural exchange.

There truly is something for everyone …

To find out more, and to sign up, please visit:https://globalclassroom2011-12.wikispaces.com

To find out more about this year’s Kids Speak VoiceThread project created and run by the first grade students of Deb Frazier’s class in Ohio,US please visit:
Primary Perspective https://deb-frazier.blogspot.com/

Welcome to a world of GLOBAL opportunities! This is going to be an amazing year!

Deb Frazier (Project Creator) and Michael Graffin (Project Coordinator)

Note: This article by Deb Frazier originally appeared on Teaching Village, and is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Non Commercial, No Derivatives 3.0 License. If you wish to share it you must re-publish it “as is”, and retain any credits, acknowledgements, and hyperlinks within it.

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7 Responses

  1. Barbara says:

    What a wonderful project! I can’t believe how large this has grown since I first heard of it.

    I hope a lot of teachers will join you–it sounds like a great experience, and a lot of fun 🙂

    • Hi Barbara. We have literally been blown away by the interest in #globalclassroom, particularly since we launched about 6 weeks ago.

      Through careful planning, and the involvement of some fantastic global collaborative teachers, we’re building something special.

      Over time, we’d love to make this project more internationally representative, as we’d like more teachers in Asia to bring their ideas and experience to this project.

      Thanks for giving us the opportunity to share our work on Teaching Village.

      Regards,

      Michael Graffin (@mgraffin)
      Global Classroom Project Coordinator

  2. Ann Foreman says:

    Hi Barbara,

    Sounds like a really great inititiative. Have just posted a link to it on the TeachingEnglish facebook page

    I’m sure lots of people there would like you to keep them updated on the project and to know how they could become involved.

    Best,

    Ann

  3. Nick says:

    This is something that really resonates with me. My son is half Japanese and we hope to travel a lot in the future. I really want him to feel at home in any country we live in.

    All the best with the project!

  4. aziz says:

    First of all that’s a great teaching learning experinece Deb.I’m very certain that a lot of people would like to be part of this online global classroom to share experiences and to discuss common challenges and issues.I would merely say that i hope you keep on going and growing and i hope you all the best in the world!

  1. November 23, 2011

    […] A Global Classroom is Born (by Deb Frazier) – Teaching Village Source: http://www.teachingvillage.org […]

  2. December 2, 2012

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