Around the world

I'm currently attending the Teaching and Learning with Vision conference on the Gold Coast, and while my wonderful daughter has decided to wake up at 4am, I thought I would write a quick blog post.

I've been very fortunate to have my proposal to present at the Global Education Conference accepted. And while I acknowledge that I am still a novice at international collaboration, I have made some progress of late.

One of the problems I find with typical international collaborative projects is that they tend to be one-offs, and reliant on a serendipitous alignment of curriculum (or, you just change your curriculum to fit the collaborative project). This isn't always possible in a busy school. My vision for international collaboration is that, while we engage in collaborative projects when possible, there is also a constant, low-key collaboration happening with our students and students around the country and world.

We decided that writing would the the ideal conduit for such connections. As I wrote in a previous blog post, the research around ICT and writing is very strong - students write more, of a higher quality, make more revisions, fewer errors and are more engaged when using technology to write. And all schools and all students write. So we set up the Writers' Club, a place for passionate writers from anywhere around the world to share their writing with a global audience. Currently we have five schools from Victoria and one from Pakistan. And we are looking for more.



The benefits of such a community are:

• Writing is usually text based (though not always). The technological requirements are therefore minimal.
• Because the community is only for passionate writers, the teacher can control how many students are a part of the community, and there are fewer problems with students who don't want to be a part of the site. Everyone who is there wants to be there.
• Blogging doesn't require time-zones to align. Students can contribute what they want, how often they want, when they want.
• There is no need to change any curriculum. Students can put up narrative pieces, persuasive pieces, information texts, or any other writing they would normally do in class.
• Students instantly get a global audience for their writing. We are already seeing spontaneous cross-school connections, initiated solely by students.