"We don't all ride camels, you know."
"We don't all act like that comedian Jeff Foxworthy says -
we're not all red-necks in South Georgia."
- The Flat Classroom Project
Cool Cat Teacher Blog
Author Information:
The author of this blog is Vicki Davis; high school teacher and IT director at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. (It does not note what courses she teaches.)Vicki co-created four award winning international wiki-centric projects, the Flat Classroom™ project, the NetGenEd™ Project, the Eracism Project™, the Horizon project, and Digiteen™ with teacher Julie Lindsay. She is also cofounder of the Flat Classroom Conference to be held in Beijing, China in February 2010.
After browsing through hundreds of links to education-related blogs, Cool Cat Teacher jumped out at me. The blog originally started after Ms. Davis went to a conference on technology back in 2005. Since then, she created this blog, and has won numerous awards for it, which made me want to read on (it has to be good to win that many awards! i.e. 2008 Edublog Award for Best Teacher Blog.) I frequently stopped to read her posts as I was skimming through, and as I did there was a central theme I found: introspection, self-awareness, positivity. Her thoughts and ideas make you stop and think once and a while about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Not to mention that she also gives many helpful links to other sites, strategies, ideas, and opinions. I also was drawn to her because I read in her bio about a Flat Classroom Project that she founded. I immediately thought of one of my favorite books, “The World Is Flat”, by Thomas Friedman. Her “Project” is based off of his book. So, I found we have a lot in common and read on.
The posting I selected is related to the Flat Classroom Project. Ms. Davis wrote this with her co-founder of the project, Julie Lindsay, back in April of 2010, entitled, The Flat Classroom: Mobile and Ubiquitous. The blog posting explains the flat classroom project:
“It is a global collaborative project that joins together middle and senior high school students. This project is part of the emerging trend in internationally-aware schools to embrace a holistic and constructivist educational approach to work collaboratively with others around the world in order to create students who are competitive and globally-minded. One of the main goals of the project is to 'flatten' or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working isolated and alone, 2 or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom. This is done through the Internet using Web 2.0 tools such as Wikispaces and Ning. The topics studied are “real-world scenarios based on the book ‘The World is Flat’.”
Go the project's website to find out more information! Very interesting..
Wow. I totally agree with your selection. I think it really nice. I check it out too. I also remembered the "World is Flat" book we read. It is very interesting to learn that one day in the future we have to utilize as much virtual learning in our classroom. I think our students now will all be ready for something like that since all like to use computers. Also it may become much easier for us to plan and prepare for classes. I agree, it is very interesting. Thanks for share the blod with us.
ReplyDeleteCool Cat Teacher Blog is one filled with many resources. This blog can be a great source of inspiration.
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