One exciting prospect that comes from having increased access to computers is the opportunity to make link with classrooms around the world, which can bring an international perspective to literacy, social studies, science, math, languages and history.

The Global Education Collaborative is a social network for teachers to link up classrooms around the world. Other sites that can help facilitate these kinds of projects are Taking It Global, Global Collaboration Workshop Links and e-pals. iEARN is a “non-profit global network that enables teachers and young people to use the Internet and other new technologies to collaborate on projects that both enhance learning and make a difference in the world.”

Some notable global projects include the International Teen Life Project, which is described its purpose as follows: “to have teenagers from different locations around the globe exchange their thoughts and perceptions of what their lives are like. By viewing, reading, and listening to the perspectives of others from around the globe, we hope that you will gain a greater perception of the similarities and differences of people’s lives around the world. In this project we want to give you an opportunity to explore issues, and work intensely to gain a clearer understanding of concerns that people have in the world.” 1001 Flat World Tales is another example, which involves students from around the world collaborating in a creative writing project. The Flat Planet project aims for students to use the internet to work together and explore current environmental issues, the way these issues are being dealt with in the respective countries and exploration of any International Agreements on these issues.

Why do it?

This teachers’ guide to international collaboration using the internet offers practical suggestions and tips to help teachers and students connect to their peers in projects across the globe.

It also presents a range of reasons why collaboration can enrich students’ learning:

“In local to global collaborations using the Internet, the philosophy of international education is to provide action learning in real world contexts and experiences where students are given both opportunity, encouragement, mentoring to:

1. embrace, experience, understand and honor the commonalties of histories, experiences, and perspectives that they discover among global peers as affirmation that their are others like them;
2. embrace, experience, understand and honor the diversities of histories, experiences, and perspectives as opportunities to understand the world in new ways and to understand that these diversities bring positive strengths and insights to our human experiences;
3. understand, experience and honor that multiple versions of ideas, content, experiences and perspectives do exist and can be mutually accepted and sustained side by side …by not automatically assuming that differences will negate one another because only one way can be right or only one idea can work;
4. understand and experience that their local action learnings about community, culture, geography, resources, lives, and hopes of work and play, of struggle, conflict and achievement have connection to the issues, conversations, and struggles, realities, hopes and dynamics of nations;
5. understand and experience through local to global action learning that the process of knowing about the world, both historically and in the present, is a generative process with ongoing revision of knowledge with new, previously unavailable or unknown information and insight;
6. understand that the goal of local to global action learning curricular projects is the enhancement of collaborative understandings not competitive challenges for in collaborative lateral respect of one another is found the greatest opportunity to honor inclusion of all positive efforts, rather than negating one another with the exclusion that can from competition to declare winners and losers.”

Source: Kristi Rennebohm Franz, adapted from her article “Towards a Critical Social Consciousness in Children: Multicultural Peace Education in A First Grade Classroom”. The Ohio State University College of Education Journal Theory Into Practice. Vol 35, Number 4, 1996.