Flat Classroom Certified Teacher

The Challenge: Design a global collaborative project.

This challenge came at quite a fortuitous time as I was already collaborating with 2 schools in the U.S. We were trying to decide how best to exploit our enthusiasm for getting our learners working together, when the question seemed to answer itself. One of my colleagues was complaining that her learners were failing to use Standard English on Edmodo when communicating with schools abroad, and this was leading to confusion among learners in the partner schools, as well as suggesting that the project wasn’t rigorous enough in terms of its required literacy standards (a serious concern as many stakeholders, such as parents and school managers, were ‘watching’ on Edmodo).

I suggested that we take this problem and turn it into a learning experience and the result of many conversations and negotiation was this project - Oh My English!^[1] (which was is also published on the Flat Classroom Global Projects page here).

Figure 1 illustrates the process we - on the Flat Classroom Certified Teacher course - had to go through in outsourcing part of our videos exploring a topic from The World is Flat^[2]. From my experiences on the Flat Classroom project, I was keen to move toward collaboration - as opposed to cooperation - by challenging them to outsource part of their final product to learners in another country. It was not necessary that this take the form of a video; my learners have free reign in deciding the format of the information but this phase does create the condition whereby all learners were working together toward a common goal.

At the time of writing, the learners have produced the first artefact which is a set of guidelines or promises to those we collaborate with. The learners co-constructed this together and a signed copy is on display on our noticeboard in school. They have also requested their outsourced materials from our partner schools and will receive these in the next week or so.

The next phase involves the learners putting their guidelines to use in producing their final media product based on research into cultural points between us and our partner schools.

We have created the hashtag #ohmyenglishproject for Twitter and will use this to push out information and encourage people to follow our progress.

Working in this mode has allowed the learners to understand what it is like to truly gain from working on an international stage, being able to request primary source information as opposed to relying on hearsay, poorly edited sites or supposition. The learners have been motivated to meet deadlines and consider the standard of their communication as they practise what they have discovered, rather than theorising about the possibilities.

It will be interesting to see how the final stages of production and celebration go and media will be accessible through our Twitter hashtag and the Oh My English! site.