The students in Mrs. Saul’s 5th Grade homeroom had the the opportunity to video conference with students from Haultain Community School in Regina, Canada today.

Although nervous at first, the students from these two countries chatted for 24 minutes and learned that they aren’t so different after all. They shared common interests in sports, hobbies and reading and students from both classrooms were surprised that they’d studied several of the same novels this year! They wore similar clothing and liked the same music.

There were differences, too. Haultain Community School, some 1500 miles from Roanoke, has less than 100 students in grades K-8.  Temperature and snowfall totals are very different, but since the metric system isn’t our standard unit of measurement, some figuring had to be done!

Mrs. Saul’s other classes are collaborating with students from other countries as well, but since time zones can create conferencing problems, these classrooms have shared Voicethreads with students in Beijing, China and Bullcreek, Australia. Their friends in Bullcreek were unable to respond to their Voicethread and shared this flickr show instead.

Mrs. Kern’s class shared their thoughts about their height today as part of the How Tall is a First Grader project. 

The students are already looking forward to the next round of measuring activities that will take place in April.  Stay tuned to see how much they’ve grown!

It wasn’t too long ago that collaboration in the classroom meant that two teachers were working together, side by side, on a project. If a teacher wanted her students to collaborate with students in another school, be it across town or across the country, pen pals were really the only option.
There are many web tools available to today’s educators that make participation in a collaborative project much easier. I used several of these tools to work with K-8 students a week ago while in Mexico.
The Ocean Studies Wiki was the vehicle I used to help third graders understand animal adaptations and the ocean food web, to stir the imagination of eight graders in a co-taught creative writing class, and to help kindergarteners improve their knowledge of Spanish. Voice Thread was a heavily used collaborative tool for this project.
Speech students from a neighboring district also participated – they voiced questions about the ocean for me to answer.
I returned to my schools to face some very excited students and teachers and was pleased that a few more educators in my world had were now aware of how easily they could use collaboration to enhance their curriculum.