Students Selected as Expert Advisors and Judges for International Competition

For Further Information

Guy McClure

256-233-8296

Guy.McClure@athens.edu

For immediate release
November 18, 2013
www.athens.edu

Students Selected as Expert Advisors and Judges for International Competition

ATHENS, Ala. - With the mindset that global collaboration must be a literacy in every curriculum, Athens’ State University’s Educational Technology minor pre-service teachers will be experiencing global education in a real way. Students enrolled in ED 408: Issues and Trends in Educational Technology during Spring and Summer semesters will be working as expert advisors and judges in one of the Flat Classroom Projects founded by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis, co-creators of The Flat Classroom Project. The Flat Classroom Project is a global collaborative project designed for students, typically in Grades 3-12, using Web 2.0 tools to support communication and collaboration between students and teachers from classrooms around the world.

These pre-service teachers will be gaining the experience of flattening classrooms and will take this invaluable education and experience into their classrooms to continue the move to global collaboration one step at a time, regardless of the curriculum topic.

The Flat Classroom Project will include over 200 students from 10 classrooms around the world. One of the main goals of the project is to 'flatten' or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working in isolation, two or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom. Grade 3-12 students work in groups from different schools and different countries to produce content on a wiki page from which they create an individual digital artifact (video), including outsourced video or multimedia from another student, which they embed into their team wiki page. Web 2.0 tools will be used to facilitate communication, interaction and collaboration between students and teachers from all participating classrooms. The topics studied and discussed are real-world scenarios based on 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman.

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