Global Collaboration

For the final project of Using Social Media in Education course we had the choice to gamify our classroom, or create a Global Collaboration project. Gamifying a classroom is a little tricky when you don't have a classroom. So I partnered up with Tabatha to create a Global Collaboration project; this worked nicely anyways because I have been placed in a 6th grade classroom for student teaching. Now, I know what you're thinking.. whats the big deal? Well the highest grade I have ever been is 3rd grade, I have a TON of potential lessons for 1st-3rd graders and ZERO for 6th. This project is geared toward older kids and provides me with a good range of ideas for older kiddos.

This Global Collaboration project is an adaption from the website called Flat Connections. At this website you are able to subscribe and become part of their network for each semester or school year. They provide a description of the projects they will be doing before you decide to subscribe, which is what we were looking into. To see the description of Digiteen follow this link.

The main focus of Digiteen is to teach online safety and good digital footprints. We added some projects and took some away to create a project that would hopefully fit into my future 6th grade classroom. This wouldn't be a kind of project you would drill for 4 weeks, instead I would plan it taking 2 hrs a week for 12 weeks. Having the time spread out is going to allow students to practice good habits in between and really adopt these skills to form good habits.

We planned 4 different supporting tasks with 1 final, authentic task.
The tasks include:

• Questionnaire of personal online habits. (google forms)
• Online Map Scavenger hunt. (tour builder)

• Blog posting on how to improve their online habits. 
• Use media clips and relate to real life with global pal. (skype)

Final task: Students will create a presentation for their classmates of what digital citizenship means to them and how they apply it everyday.

Watch the video for a tutorial on how to use tour builder!


We have been playing around with having students completing the map scavenger hunt and then they could create their own for the Epal. This would probably add a couple of weeks to the timeline.

This brings me to the logistics of finding a class to collaborate with, if you pay for the subscription through Flat Connections this process will be a lot smoother and you'll basically be matched with a school. If you don't want to pay I would suggest connecting with a school in your district and branch out from there. You can use a lot of different resources to branch out by using education twitter chats, teacher blogs, or any other virtual PLNs.

Please look further into this projects by checking out our google doc, and website.