It’s finally here.  Today is the day.  At 1.05pm I begin the first part of a rather long journey which will eventually see me land in stunning Argentina 25 minutes before I’ve actually left New Zealand.   (I love that part!)

For the next 7 weeks I will hopefully blogging as much as I can over at To Argentina and Beyond.

Please join me as  I begin this wonderful opportunity from the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s Language Immersion Awards and AFS to immerse myself in the language and culture of my host country Argentina.  Whilst I haven’t “officially” heard, I believe that I will be living in Paranà .

No doubt most of you are aware of what is going on with Al Upton and the Mini Legends – so I’m not going to rehash the story, just point you in the direction of strategically placed hyperlinks. Vicki Davis writes a great explanation post about her thoughts on this issue, sadly, in place of her Funday Monday post.  Graham Wegner points out the ramifications for his project and Clarence Fisher questions is blogging dangerous and has blogging become a political act??

Thanks to Miguel Guhlin for making this available ……

….. so that we can show our support for Al and his Mini-Legends and hope that the “Powers that Be” allow blogging to continue for these spectacular 8 and 9 year olds and their fabulous teacher.

I had to laugh ……. because isn’t this always the way?  Just days, and I mean just days, after finding a creative commons image to represent my passion for a classroom without walls for the Miguel Guhlin’s Passion Quilt Meme ……… the perfect photo in my very own backyard presented itself! Our very own classroom with out walls – literally! So I just had to share!

This is one of four classrooms in our Learning Team, currently undergoing complete renovation. Renovation includes the replacement of windows, airconditioning, the adding of teacher office space, doors that open out onto the astro turf and field as well as the installation of an Interactive Whiteboard. When the fourth classroom is complete we will have eight classrooms out of 18 with IWBs! Exciting stuff!

Wondering if you’re heading in the right direction with 21st Century learning? I definitely have been. Then I watched this video by Jackie Halaw of Teacherhacks and realised that my students and I are no longer at the “fork in the road”, we are on the main highway with our windows down, radio blarring and having a the trip of a life time.

I’m certain now that if I keep these 3 steps at the forefront of my teaching and learning plans for Web2.0 tools / technology in the classroom, our journey will be less bumpy one as we drive along with our pedagogical roadmap.

Step One:
Transform your class into a

learning space

You can do this easily by allowing your students to talk, build, create, collaborate.

How have we done this? In our classroom we’re using …….

………. a wiki as a hub for all our learning – everyone contributes!

………. a blog to share what we’re doing with anyone who’s interested. Our two class mascots help provide motivational for blog posts and blogging is an integral part of how we do reading and writing in our classroom every day. Thanks to educators like Clarence Fisher and Jeff Utecht, it’s just how we do things around here!

……… voicethread to record things that are important to us and to share our learning with others, as well as collaborate with others!
Check out some of our voicethreads:
Sir Edmund Hilary – we shared this with several schools in NZ,
Practising Our Spanish – now students learning spanish in America are adding to our learning!
Ancient Seven Wonders of the World – cooperative project with a Year 8 class at our own school

Step Two:
Teach students the skills of competition, cooperation and collaboration

How can you do this?
Cooperative learning in our classroom underpins our whole learning philosophy. Art Costa’s Habits of Minds and Edward DeBono’s 6 Thinking Hats plus Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences are major pins intertwined throughout our learning too. Bloom’s Taxomy features heavily in our planning If you ever have the opportunity to attend Professional Development on any of these three things, do it! It will be time well spent. If that kind of PD opportunity doesn’t present itself, there’s more links below to help you get started.

Educational Origami – this is brilliant and a MUST read resource from one of New Zealand’s own – Andrew Churches!

Habits of Mind
Developing Creative/Critical Habits of Mind

Multiple Intelligences
Assess Your Own MI
Books and Articles on MI

Cooperative Learning

CoRT Thinking

Step Three:
Introduce your students to their global peers and provide them the opportunity to collaborate

How can you do this?
There are so many places that you can go to and ask for collaborators or see who is looking for collaborators. The very first place I started with was the wonderful Jen Wagner and OnlineProjects4Teachers. Matched up another wonderful teacher, Ms Cofino, who was interested in learning more about wikis too, saw our two classrooms collaborate through ProjectFeelGood. Jen also hosts JenuineTech.com, Creative Projects for the Pre-K6 Elementary Classroom. Most of the planning is done for you, you just need to climb on board at your own level and create! Salute to Seuss was a blast and The Holiday Card Project was very creative and great for integrating Google Earth!
One of the best introductions to global peers would have to be our involvement as Sounding Board Peer Reviewers for the Horizon Project and then the FlatClassroom Project – both run by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis. A simple email expressing interesting in being a part of these projects was all it took to get involved with these two brilliant educators. And it was amazing! We learnt so much about ourselves and about what’s going on in the world!! Another simple yet extremely effective project we got involved with to improve our digital storytelling skills was Life ‘Round Here – faciliatated by the fabulous Chris Craft. Now we are just finishing off taking part in Project Lemonade which I found out about through the Classroom2.0 ning.

Here’s some other places you can find similar projects to join or find educators that are interested in collaborating too.

Projects by Jen (Ning)

Classroom2.0 (Ning)
- the beauty of the ning is you can post your own discussion and ask for collaborators or help to do/learn something.

Twitter
Join today and build up your personal learning network by following people like @crafty184, @courosa, @langwitches, @lparisi, @mrmayo, @cburell, @bcrosby @glassbeed
because these amazing educators often ask if anyone is interested in working on a collaborative project.

TakingIT Global

ClassroomBookTalk

CICL Centre for Interactive Learning

And the best quote of all …………..

The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher – John Holt

So, what are you doing in your 3 steps?