Collaborate

Interviews / Finding Partners for Collaborative Projects

Interviews

This is a series of interviews with educators about online projects, some of which are sponsored by a teacher or organization, others are created by two teachers deciding to work together. Listen to what they have to say about why they got involved and what they and their students get out of their participation. These interviews are recordings of calls made with Skype.

Learn more about ways to collaborate at: Learn to Telecollaborate
Learn about projects you can get involved in at: The Connected Classroom

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Mary Ellen Lynch

Mary Ellen Lynch is a cycle 1 (year 2) teacher at St. Johns School of the Riverside School Board in the Province of Quebec. She began exploring web 2.0 tools in order to share her students' work with her community. This was the beginning of an exciting exploration for her and her students. It opened up her classroom to working with others via some of these tools. This interview took place after the class had participated in a Skype videoconference with a class in Oregon to exchange information about butterflies and to learn more about each other. Colleen Lauzier, vice-principal of the school witnessed the exchange and adds her comments at the end of the interview.

View the movie  (Recorded 2008) A new window will open Visit her blog

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Karen Rye

Karen Rye is a cycle 3 teacher at St. Johns School of the Riverside School Board in the Province of Quebec. She and her colleagues embarked on their first telecollaborative project. She describes how it changed the dynamics for the teachers and the students.

Playgrounds: the good, the bad and the ugly

Listen to the interview (recorded March 18, 2008) A new window will open

Tools mentioned:

Slideshare
VoiceThread
Wikispaces

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Lisa Parisi

Lisa Parisi is a grade 5 teacher in Long Island, New York. Her students have participated in a variety of telecollaborations. Find out how Lisa got involved and how her teaching style has changed as a result of this experience.

Denton Dynamos - links to all of the class' projects, blogs, podcasts...
Comparing Hemispheres - wiki for the project
Classroom Book Talks - Book talks by students from a number of collaborating schools

  Listen to the interview  (recorded February 10, 2008)
A new window will open.

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Global Explorers: Cheryl Lykowski

Classroom teacher, Cheryl Lykowski, has made a connection between her school in Michigan and a school in Bucaramanga, Colombia. The students from both classes have created podcasts to explain their lives, schools and communities  and to learn more about their partners. At the students' initiative, they have begun writing a blog.

Wiki
Listen to their podcasts

Listen to the interview (recorded (January 28, 2008)

Tools: Skype
Clock on the wiki: Clocklink
Slideshow on wiki of video Skype call: One True Media

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Technospud: Jennifer Wagner

Jennifer Wagner, from California, sponsors projects which allow teachers of primary school children to get their classes involved in online projects. Many of these projects are short term and are a good introduction for both the teacher and the class to working with others at a distance. This is a good way to start and to make some contacts with other teachers for future projects.

To learn about the projects: Projects by Jen
To join a group of teachers talking about the projects and more: http://projectsbyjen.ning.com/

Listen to the interview  (recorded January 21, 2008)

Mentioned in the interview: Bubbleshare (no longer available)
Ning - what is a ning?  Ning is an online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network. It has forums, blogs, and other spaces for sharing built in. You can create groups within a social network of people who are interested in a particular topic. For example, within the technospud ning there is a group for the current project, another for interactive white boards as well as several more. There are a number of nings that have been set up related to education. One very active one is Classroom 2.0 which features discussions about the many new tools available and how best to use them in the classroom. There is now a fee for nings.

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Finding Partners for Collaboration

One way to find partners is to become part of a social network of teachers. This can take many forms.

Twitter
Many teachers use twitter as a way to share resources and ask for help or collaboration. You can create a twitter account and start following fellow educators. Slowly others start to follow you and you can advertise to them when you are looking for partners. You may also see a project advertised that would suit your class's needs.
http://twitter.com/

Ning
Ning is a site where people can create like-minded communities. There is a community specifically for people interested in global education. The members advertise for partners for specific projects as well as discuss issues of global education
http://globaleducation.ning.com/

You can find projects and registries here