Flat Classroom Project wiki

After exploring several different wikis, I found the “Flat Classroom Project”. This wiki is used as a collaborative resource and presentation tool for two classrooms, one in Georgia and one in Bangladesh, to work together discussing and reporting on a variety of topics from Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. The students produced text, audio, and video to present their collaboration on each topic as well as maintained a blog with the teachers for discussion and assignment reminders. Judges from around the world evaluated the students' work. The content in each topic is complete, thorough and a real demonstration of the use of technology to share with students across the globe in the creation of the content, while presenting their results to the global community.

This wiki is a tremendous resource for the students on how to manage all aspects of the project. There are directions on making the audio and video and uploading them. The teachers are careful to address privacy concerns about students sharing information over the Internet. Some of the technology the students used in addition to the wiki and a blog included Google Video, Skype, dropload.com, evoca.com, and Flickr. The teachers presented at NECC this June, and this site won several awards recently. Also, Thomas Friedman has mentioned this project in his newest edition of The World is Flat just released for publication. This project is an amazing demonstration of emerging technology in an education setting.

Only after examining this site closely did I realize that one of the teachers was the person who writes the "Cool Cat Teacher Blog" I reported on last week!

This video is a good introduction to the “Flat Classroom Project”.