Colaboración global

I was invited to do a sessions about setting up a global collaboration project at the teacher training university in Madrid. The university that friend and SMART Exemplary Educator Sergio Cabezas teaches educational and instructional technology to ( new) teachers. Each weekend the Universuty organizes voluntary periodic training sessions for students and I was asked to do such a session. Amazing.
The day before the actual session we were at the office of Lab Possible, where I should share my presentation with a few emplyees and especially with the interpretor that was about to translate everything that I was going to say during my 8-hour session the day after, due to the fact that some Spanish students had a difficulty to follow a session in English. Fair enough. So, she needed to know what my session was about in order to translate in real time as quickly as she could.

I started with good practices from my own experience from the past few years that Ie done global collaboration projects with classes from around the globe and after that I shared on how to set up a collaboration project with the use of SMART amp: either within your domain, cross domain or - if the partner school doesn have a Google Apps for Education account - how you can still add them to your domain in order to use SMART amp.

Students contributions to the SMART Notebook lesson using 'shout it out'

The main thing is of course the pedagogic value that you as a teacher are aiming for and want your students to gain from such a project. When collaborating together, make sure that you as a teacher remark the students with the basic principle that collaborating with each other is based on equality. Especially when collaborating with students from other countries make sure that students have these two things in mind:

1. reciprocity 

and

2. equivalence 

In order to gain global awareness and actually learn something from the project, students need to have an open mind and shoudn't be judging the other team or school they are working on.


These students have worked very hard and it was the best group of teachers to work with ever. They were very engaged en they knew so much education technology and did use it during their presentations without my help! Amazing. Sergio and his team did a great job! These future teachers will undoubtly make a difference for their future students. Good for you Spain! Take a look at a few results created by the students:

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And my presentation that I used with students' contributions:

Collaboracionglobal from Boris Berlijn