You are invited to the
Flat Classroom Book Club with TakingITGlobal
“Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration One Step at a Time”
by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis. Pearson Publication, January 2012
Global collaboration starts with connecting yourself to the world. Students are the greatest textbook ever written for each other. The same is true for teachers. We are passionate about connecting and facilitating effective collaborations between classrooms because we’ve seen the power of how it can engage students and teach them the skills they need to be successful in the 21st century.
We want to bring in people who are nervous, who don’t know how, or who have tried to connect and were frustrated. We also want to bring back those teachers who tried it and got burned out. Now it is time to enlarge the circle of global collaborative excellence in a massive way.
"Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds'' is a terrific guide, by two real pioneering teachers, on how the networked world can be used for cooperative learning that can enrich education and empower students -- anywhere and everywhere.
Insightful, innovative, and practical, this book is a must read for any educator interested in preparing competent global citizens.
- Yong Zhao, Ph. D, Presidential Chair and Associate Dean, College of Education, University of Oregon
Open the door and find a new world! In this significant contribution to global education, Julie and Vicki have produced a resource for teachers that contains much needed information, challenges education thinking and provides resources on each and every page. This is a book a teacher can read and immediately open a global door for their students. For me. it is so exciting (and a relief!) to see that the voice of change in education thinking is the voice of our students.
It is our vision that if we can have enough educators linking together and learning about this at the same time, that a natural byproduct will be the creation of many new, exciting global collaborations. It is time to get past the cute stories of global collaboration into the nuts and bolts of the pedagogy that makes it happen. (Although there are a lot of powerful stories to tell), and explore and share the resources available for collaboration.
To help facilitate this conversation, Flat Classroom are joining with TakingITGlobal. Have you purchased or started to read 'Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration One Step at a Time'? yet? Why not join this book club and be part of the conversation around the book, part of the conversation around Flat Classroom AND part of the conversation around Taking IT Global and their virtual classroom facility. The book club will run through the Flat Classroom space (http://flatclassroom.tiged.org/) on the TIGED website. Participants can register with the code: bookclub.
Flat Classroom Projects and Flat Classroom Conference and Live Events Inc. bring together students and educators from around the globe in synchronous as well as asynchronous projects and challenge-based learning experiences.
TakingITGlobal (www.tigweb.org) hosts an online multilingual community of youth from around the world who use social networking to create positive global change. Young leaders logging in to TIG inspire each other to make a difference, learn about issues that matter, and find opportunities to constructively channel their energy and ideas into action. With a growing membership of over 412,000 individuals in every country of the world, the TIG site reached over 5 million people last year alone. TIG’s mission is to empower youth to understand and act on the world’s greatest challenges. This mission is being accomplished through TIG’s online community and through its platform for schools, TakingITGlobal for Educators (TIGed).
TIGed (www.tiged.org) is host to a community of over 7,900 educators in 135 countries who are interested in empowering their students to think and act as world citizens. Visitors to the site will also find a collection of resources that facilitate the inclusion of global perspectives in the classroom, and a virtual classroom and collaboration space designed for international learning partnerships. Members can start their own collaborative projects with other educators they find in the community, or they can engage their students in TIGed-organized programming in three key areas: global citizenship, environmental stewardship, and student voice.
The hashtag for our conversations is #flatclass and the book club is, of course, free. Anyone can join us. There’s no homework - just conversation and learning. We’ll all be there to discuss the future of education with each other. We hope global collaborators from around the world will join us and share their stories too. Conversations will hinge around our new book, Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds. The book is also available in ebook format.
Every week for 4 weeks we will meet Wednesdays at 5 pm EST (GMT-4), starting August 22. Visit our Book club calendar to convert these times to your Time Zone. Subscribe to this calendar via Google calendar to keep up with events.
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Flat Classroom and TakingITGlobal Book Club Meeting Times and Topics for Conversation
| Week and Date | Time | Topics of Conversation |
| Week 1:
Wednesday August 22 | 5pm EST | Ch.1 - Introduction to Global Collaboration
Ch.3 - Step 1: Connection |
| Week 2:
Wednesday August 29 | 5pm EST | Ch.4 - Step 2: Communication
Ch.5 - Step 3: Citizenship |
| Week 3:
Wednesday September 5 | 5pm EST | Ch.6 - Step 4: Contribution and Collaboration |
| Week 4:
Wednesday September 12 | 5pm EST | Ch.10 - Designing and Managing a Global Collaborative Project
Ch.12 - Rock the World |
Get ready for the Book Club!
- Sign up for the book club
Kate Gatto kate@takingitglobal.org
Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher
Julie Lindsay @julielindsay
Co-founders Flat Classroom Projects, @flatclassroom, Flat Classrooms Network
We will use this Blackboard Collaborate room: http://tinyurl.com/flats1213
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