Global Partnerships
This year the staff at Edgewood Campus School has been flattening our walls to learn with other students around the world. ISTE Standards (International Society for Technology Education) describe the skills and knowledge students need to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly global and digital society, “Students will develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures.”
We have many students involved in global education. This year we have partnered with JDO foundation, Level Up Village, and Flat Connections in order to provide a variety of international experiences for our students.
New this is year is a partnership with JDO Foundation. The JDO Foundation’s mission is “to provide an enriched educational experience for classrooms (PK-8) by providing state of the art technologies, and the professional training to the educators managing these technologies.” ECS students in Grades 3, 4, & 6 have been partnered with schools in Berkshire, England. Communications via Google Hangouts, Google Classroom, e-mail, and shared websites have been used to introduce the students to their partners school and teacher. During November fourth grade students are explaining our celebration of Thanksgiving and learning about Guy Fawkes Night in England. Third grade students have planned to read books and discuss them.
Flat Connections provides unique approaches to online global collaboration. We ‘flatten’ the disconnected classroom to become a global learning environment of the future. Grade two students are currently participating in K-2 Building Bridges to Tomorrow Project. This project is a global collaborative project that joins together students at the lower elementary levels. They will collaborate with The Wilderness School in Auckland, New Zealand. We have met each other’s classes via Skype meetings. We discovered that their school is close to an active volcano and they were excited to learn that our school is next to Vilas Zoo. We have learned they like to eat a lot of the same snack foods that we eat. We learned about handball, and they are excited to learn about playing in snow because it doesn’t snow where they live.
Students in Grade 5 participated in Level Up Village Video Game Design class. In this class students learned the building blocks of coding using the MIT’s Scratch platform. Together with their partners in India, the students created animations and video games while learning sequencing skills and to how to communicate in a video letter.
Students in Grade 7 at Edgewood campus school are participating in a Flat Connections, Digitween project. In this project students work in global teams to develop a researched-based wiki and then create action projects around important digital citizenship issues which are designed by classroom groups. This year we have met students from Nevada, Bahrain, Thailand, and Virginia. EDGEWOOD CAMPUS SCHOOL students are currently creating skits and iMovies about digital privacy, online etiquette and respect, digital literacy, and how we use the internet to learn.
