Musings - Just Learning

Last week, I had the GREAT privilege of being interviewed over skype by Chris Betcher about Flat Classrooms - international collaborative projects. Chris is an Australian teacher who has been on exchange here in Canada for the last year. Even more flattering was the opportunity to be interviewed alongside Janet Barnstable, who is a great lady and such an inspiration as an Internet collaborative project pioneer. Janet and I are working together this year on the same team for the Global Virtual Classroom Web Design Contest. I have learned so much from her already!

Chris interviewed us by using Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat as a lens through which we now see the world. The global flatteners include such leveraging technologies as the Internet, online telephony services, web-based management software (i.e. Google docs and wikis) and so on. These have greatly facilitated communication and collaboration between groups at a distance. What a terrific opportunity we now have to provide our students with training in cross-cultural communication, collaboration skills, good netiquette practices - all while we can be also addressing our curricular goals. During our interview, we offer up some good tips and strategies for making use of these tools to participate in projects, big and small, that involve students from different places around the globe.

Please do check out the podcast which is posted over at The Virtual Staff Room - Chris does an awesome job of editing and presentation. I asked him later which software he uses and, besides audacity, he uses something called the levelator (little app that will bring all the audio levels to the same level) that I want to pass on as a recommendation.