I picked up a reference to the Flat Classroom Project in an article by Peter Gow in the Spring 2008 issue of Independent School and after doing a Google search found The Horizon Project, the follow-up project to Flat Classroom. This is a leading edge student and teacher collaborative project that leverages the power of technology to teach in the manner that Ted McCain speaks about in his book Teaching for Tomorrow.
This project is:“… a joint project between five classes ranging from grades 10-12 at the International School Dhaka, Bangladesh, Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia, Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne, Australia, the Vienna International School in Vienna, Austria and the Shanghai American School in Shanghai, China to research, discuss, and envision the education and society of the future according to the six trends outlined in the Horizon Report 2007 Edition.”
Students from the five different schools are grouped into teams to conduct a constructivist research project and produce wiki pages with the results of their findings.
As the Horizon Project site puts it:“This project is designed as a summative & genuine assessment project to meet every National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) as defined by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) (the largest teacher-based non profit organization in educational technology) while considering the preeminent educational theories that move students towards higher level critical thinking. We want our students to understand this world and be comfortable in a collaborative business world that literally never sleeps.Many of the people who are participating in this project believe that the future of education lies in harnessing the power of the new connected internet (Web 2) but also so that we need to learn how to change, document, and share in order to survive. We must become more able to change in the future in order to remain relevant and create projects that better facilitate global understanding between tomorrow’s leaders. (We believe all students should participate in global collaborative projects.)”
These are must-visit websites for 21st century teachers (and students) to see what is possible when a group of committed teachers (and students), presumably with the support of their school administrations, move beyond their classrooms, schools and time zones into truly global learning communities.
