Building Learning Communities

by Alan November

Earcos Teachers Conference, 2010, Manila, Philippines

Idea: use Google Docs to get students to take communal notes and invite you so you can view it immediately.

Idea: Start a Ning site and post a video for reflection and discussion before class. (see isabc2009.ning.com) Usually, when a class ends a teacher doesn't have any evidence that the discussion and reflection continues even after the course is finished.

Idea: Get commentary beyond your own classroom. Take advantage of the global motivational force of a worldwide audience. Have students create a Ning site for news stories written by the kids themselves. [This could be a school newspaper!]

Idea: Any novel you read in class from now on, get on the web and connect your kids to people who live in that town. In fact, contact the author (if possible, naturally). Get the students to write to the author and they may get a response. If you get the students to engage the author they're going to take their writing a little more seriously.

Idea: Global elementary classrooms for free with Skype. Find sconnection with teachers around the world across the curriculum.(Youtube: Real-Time Global Education for FREE with Skype)

Idea: Google.com/cse to create a custom search engine. Invite teachers from around the world to add sites to the search engine. Your students can contibute sites to the search engine. Imagine if all the history teachers of the world got together and created a search engine, it would be better than any one search engine created by one teachers! Add your CSE to customsearchengine.com. Imbed it on your class blog or website.

Idea: Make one kid every day the official researcher of the class. While the teacher is teaching, one kid's job is to find the best resources on the web and add them to the search engine (above). All you have to do is invote the kids of the class or whoever to contribute.

Here are the collaborative notes for this session: http://bit.ly/9DRxNu