Home » Posts tagged '#globalcollaboration' (Page 2)
Tag Archives: #globalcollaboration
A Greener London
The typical way of learning in a classroom is still a great way to learn and to get an education. There are plenty of people who do not have that luxury. However, just like with anything else in life, there is always room for improvement.
Collaboration is an important aspect of education and it is still something that educators are learning about. Collaboration allows us to:
- Express our ideas
- Receive feedback on ideas from others
- Ask questions
- Get more involved
- Be creative
In a normal classroom setting, group work is the main way children get to collaborate with their fellow students. There were always more way to collaborate but it just took something to jumpstart ideas from educators and even students.
Benefitting from the pandemic
This article, from 2022, dives into how the pandemic really gave us an opportunity to start collaborating with each other from home and not being face-to-face.
Almost all classes all over the world had top be stopped and everything was online. This forced schools and teachers to switch up their way of teaching. They were forced to use online learning tools. Two big examples are Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams. Many of these online learning tools have different features to let students work along with each other and even speak without being in the same room together. Virtual breakout rooms let students do this while learning.
In these breakout rooms, students are in these smaller groups all trying to finish whatever assignment they were given. The breakout rooms are perfect for them to
- Practice communication skills
- Learn to work within a team
- Work on ability to compromise and lead
Even after the pandemic when school and classrooms went back to being fairly normal, the tools being used were not just forgotten. Teachers and students were able to see how much more learning can be done with online tools. I would say that learning has definitely changed for the better since the pandemic.
Another online tool used to help students is a video game. That game is Minecraft. I personally am most surprised by this because of how much I used to play it. I would have never thought that this would be accepted in education because video games are generally seen as something bad. Many say that video games are the cause of many negative things, including your studies.
Minecraft has been used so much by educators that Microsoft took notice and developed a version just for that. It is called “Minecraft: Education Edition.” The main purpose for having students use Minecraft for school is engaging students in the learning process and content creation. Creativity is the soul of Minecraft. The limits of the game is up to your imagination.
Building Croydon
This next article explains the challenge set out by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.
Sadiq Khan has a goal to tackle air pollution and reaching net zero carbon by 2030. His challenge for students in London is to reimagine Croydon Town Centre, but to make it greener and safer. This really allows students to get creative in their ideas to design the future of London. The age range for this is 5-24 years old and you can work alone or collaborate with friends. Once you have your city built with your ideas, you have to make a short video to go along with it. Your world can potentially be seen by the world when it is all presented.
I think this is a great idea for a great cause. Minecraft: Education Edition is also being provided to all school across London. This is a great chance for students to show their creativity and to work along with others to build something special. This is also just one example of how important collaboration can be for students to learn and to make a difference.
Power Unlocked: Collaboration in Education
The importance of collaboration in modern education.
Importance of collaboration in this modern education gives us a better way to go forward. Collaboration means when you do a work with the team and everyone contributes and distributes properly and equally . Now a days, technology has highlighted the collaboration into the classrooms in a modern way. It is important to use tools to collaborate now a days as the world is changing into digital tools.
Microsoft Office 365 is one of the many tools which helps to collaborate. It has a section calls ‘Team’ where we can communicate each other as a team and contribute our thoughts and make it reality. Microsoft Teams is a central hub for teamwork within Microsoft 365. It combines chat, video conferencing, file storage, and app integration into one platform. Teams allows users to create channels for specific projects or topics, making it easy for team members to collaborate in real time.
Microsoft 365 applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint allow multiple users to edit documents simultaneously. This real-time co-authoring feature simplifies group projects and document collaboration. We can also contribute and work as a team at the same time in these applications. Such as, if we want to make any ppt then the whole team can sit and make it together not even staying together.
OneDrive for Business provides secure file storage in the cloud. It is one of the largest could system ever built. It enables users to store and share files, making it easy to collaborate on documents from anywhere, on any device. On OneDrive we can create a section called ‘Sharing ‘ and make it accessible in only our teams.
SharePoint Online is a powerful platform for creating intranet sites and collaboration portals. It offers features like document libraries, lists, making it ideal for building collaborative websites and applications.
Collaboration is what makes education powerful , because a knowledge is free to everyone. By doing collaboration we can easily distribute the knowledge by contributing to make something. And there are so many tools that can help us to make it happen in this modern day.
(Grammar checked by ChatGPT & Grammarly)
Augmented Reality: The Future of Education?
Augmented Reality, or AR, is a technology that enhances an individual’s experiences in the real world with an added virtual overlay. Unlike Virtual Reality, you are not fully immersing yourself into a virtual world; rather, AR technology imprints a virtual world upon the real world. This is an increasingly popular technology, with such programs as AR Games on the Nintendo 3DS and mobile game Pokémon Go being some of the most popular games to utilize augmented reality. However, AR may have the potential to enhance students’ educational progress as well.
User CybTekk posted a comprehensive thread on X (formerly Twitter) outlining the potential upsides of augmented reality within education. This user argues that AR would allow for the classroom experience to be more immersive, with such examples as “history com[ing] to life” and “virtual labs enhanc[ing] science classes,” and that with AR, students would be able to virtually connect with the rest of the world, and take virtual, augmented reality trips to various places in the world to learn about them, all without having to leave the classroom. Plus, the article mentions how 80% of businesses use AR, and that learning how to use it early may be a valuable tool in the job market of tomorrow.
Unfortunately, there is no mention of current AR tools in use within the educational field currently. However, the potential benefits of using AR for education are not to be overlooked. The idea of allowing students to be immersed into what they are learning, rather than learning at a distance, is an exciting idea for innovation within education. I like the ideas put forth by this user, and hope that the idea and application of using AR within education is one that continues to grow traction, as it very well may be a big part of the future of educational technology.
Thanks for reading!
Virtual and Augmented Reality
How can you use VR and AR in the classroom? Virtual Reality engages multiple senses, sight, touch, hearing, and sometimes smell! In the classroom, you are not just observing material but actually being part of it. You can explore the world and visit different locations. There are virtual field trips that you could take your students on to let them explore different areas, you could check out interactive simulators to see how earthquakes affect the land and structures around them. Another example of using virtual reality in the classroom is learning about the anatomy of humans, their organs, and bones and dissecting animals as well. All of these tools give students a greater understanding and a closer look at how things work.
Augmented Reality is digitizing classroom learning. It takes what you have and enhances it. For example, it can take your drawing and make it come to life. It doesn’t require any new materials. It can be accessed with your own computer and materials.
Now that we know a little about them how can vr and ar contribute to possible successful global collaborations or meet a global goal? When I think about global goals I know that they are big goals but with lots of people all working together collaboratively they can be met. With the use of vr and ar tools we can get even more people involved and aware of what the global goals are. What are the steps to get there? With the help of the Oculus you can download an experience called Pollinator Park. This would relate to SDG 2: Zero Hunger. Pollinator Park shows what our world would look like without pollinators. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, “Pollinators help ensure the world eats. Scientists estimate that about 75% of the world’s flowering plants and about 35% of the world’s food crops depend on animal pollinators to produce. While more than 3,500 species of native bees help increase crop yields, pollinators include many more species than just bees. Flowers can be pollinated by both insects and animals – such as bees, wasps, moths, flies, butterflies, birds and even small mammals such as bats. Despite their importance, many pollinators are declining in numbers, posing a threat not only to the world’s ecosystems but to global food security as well.” Showing how this is important can help students want to be involved at home and in school.
Check out this video of Pollinator Park in action!
Experiences like Pollinator Park are numerous. There are ones that focus on other sustainable global goals as well. I looked for the ones that focused on SDG 2 as that was what I focused on this semester. Another VR experience that stood out to me was Cooking Simulator. Unlike Pollinator Park, this experience is not free. What I did like about this is that it helps you learn how to cook the food that you are growing, teaching the basic cooking mechanics like slicing and learning cooking temperatures which are lifelong skills to have.
As a future educator learning about VR and AR, I’m excited to see how I can use this in my future classroom. In my local school, we don’t have VR tools for students or the budget for them but to get that would be amazing. Hearing that the AR features don’t cost extra and use what you have is exciting and I want to see how I can incorporate that.
WE Learning Resources: Visual Arts and Community Outreach
Have you been looking for ways you and your school community can make a larger impact on our world? Are you looking for ways to promote global sustainability and inclusivity while also staying true to your content area? Well, look no further than WE.org. WE is an organization that helps classrooms around the world expand their volunteering efforts beyond their school communities. They provide resources such as videos, conferences, lesson plans, events, grants, and so much more in order to help you and your students achieve your goals.
Using their Virtual Learning Center, educators can find lessons and professional development courses that will help them provide the education they need to students about ways they can get involved and why they should. They focus on several global sustainable development goals including things such as hunger, waste clean up, and equity. There are lists of several campaigns for classrooms to get involved in. Or you can view their lesson plans and modules to learn about a specific goal or volunteer effort and you and your students can develop your own campaigns. Through this site you can also get grants to support your campaign and expand your outreach. All of their resources range from kindergarten to the high school level, so it really is for everyone!
As a future art teacher, I wanted to find lessons or campaigns I could use in my classroom where students can use the visual arts to help promote or be a part of any cause they had to offer. I was able to find a couple of lessons that I could see myself using in the future as ways to get my students involved.
We Go Green is a campaign outline that guides teachers through teaching students about waste and recycling. At each grade level, students will learn statistics about waste and recycling and come up with plans on how they can promote having a green thumb or how they themselves can help contribute to reducing waste.
Students individually or in groups can make their own goals and come up with a plan to achieve them. Then they can give themselves jobs within their campaign for how they will help to complete their goals. I thought this was interesting for an art classroom because not only can they create beautiful posters and works of art that promote recycling and reducing waste, but they can also use the waste!
By collecting trash and recycling from around the school, home, and in their communities, they can repurpose this trash to make works of art that are representative of the cause. I could even see myself planning an art show within the school to showcase the work. The event would showcase student work and display how many pounds of waste they were able to upcycle to create their work. And on a larger scale, we could possibly even turn it into a fundraiser!
Understanding Local Hunger is a unit plan on WE.org that teaches students about hunger and low resources on a local to global scale. Throughout the unit, the teacher will guide the students on learning about hunger, analyzing the statistics, coming up with possible causes, and then creating and developing possible solutions. These lessons come in all grade levels. However for the purpose of talking about how I would use this resource, I am focusing on the high school unit. These lessons are fully developed including the common core standards, objectives, resources, and procedures for each lesson. The structure for each lesson unique and caters towards all types of learners and works across all content areas. These lessons pull from math, science, English, history, and the visual arts in order to create a dynamic unit that fully encompasses everything students would need to know before developing their solutions.
Lesson 5 is specifically what I want to focus on since it involves media. In this lesson, students would have to use any art form, digital or traditional, to create a visual representation of a statistic about hunger.
I think this is an amazing lesson and project that I could have them do in groups for two to three days or individually over the course of a few days. In addition to teaching them about hunger and why it is so important, this would also be a great time to teach them about how visual media can display messages and create an atmosphere or certain perception of their subject. We could also tie in a lesson about symbolism and how certain symbols or aesthetic choices can change the meaning of your work. We could view examples of works by famous photographers, painters, and graphic designers that depict hunger and its impact on society. Students can gain inspiration about how to convey their message and statistic and use what they have learned to create their visual representation. Again we can even share these on a larger scale in an art show or online gallery!
As mentioned, if I were to pursue these projects, I would want my students to be able to share their work on a larger scale and make the greatest impact. I would want my students to understand how art can impact people and promote and messages that are important in ways that sometimes words cannot only describe. Therefore, I could reach out to WE.org and apply for their action grants such as the Heartwarming Project. Through this grant we could receive some funding that could help is in sharing their hard work outside of our school community by creating a larger event where we can to donation drives, fundraisers, recycling program, and so on. WE.org is truly a great organization and is something I will heavily consider looking into more in the future when I have my own classroom.
CHECK OUT WE.ORG FOR MORE INFORMATION ON HOW YOU AND YOUR STUDENTS CAN GET INVOLVED!
Thank you for reading!
Follow me on Twitter at @IreneOrtiz001
Teachers’ Guide to Global Collaboration
If you are an educator and are struggling to look for collaborative and enriching activities for your students inside your school or in your community then look no further! “Teachers’ Guide to Global Collaboration” is a website that allows educators and students around the world to participate in global and nationwide activities and projects right from their classroom. Teachers can find organizations that are looking for help with large scale projects, projects submitted by other teachers who would like to collaborate in specific subject areas, and even submit a request to publish your own project idea that you would like others to join. It is a great way for educators to reach new classrooms and have their students create work that is impactful outside of their schools!
My Experience
When I first opened the website I immediately opened the projects tab and searched for “art.” In clinical practice to becoming an art teacher, I have found so much more value in collaborative projects than I was expecting. I have implemented several collaborative lessons and while they were awkward for the students at first, they grew to love working together and sharing their knowledge with each other. One of my favorite projects I gave students was to work in groups along with one or more dancers from the dance class next door and try to create beautiful photographs of the dancers capturing motion and using everything they have learned about photography thus far. The students were so excited and they got to use the entire inside and outside of the school to take their pictures and they created wonderful and thoughtful images. I was so proud of their results and so happy that they enjoyed the project. However, it was difficult to give them more than just a couple days with the dancers because a mistake was made and our schedules did not align with theirs. One downside in trying to collaborate with other classrooms in your school, is trying to get on schedule with each other in a way that does not hold anyone back. But the satisfaction of collaborating on a larger scale trumps that and creates such meaningful memories with the students. Therefore, I was happy to find so many different projects and organizations that are open to artistic collaborations on a national and global scale.
What I Found
One of the projects I found is a project called “A Sense of Caring” which I think is a beautiful project for elementary and middle school students. Students either send in or receive a story or poem about what caring is to them and then the student who receives it has to create artwork based on their story. The story and artwork are then paired together and used to create Service Learning Project where students take action and show the importance of caring for others and their community. This is a beautiful project that I could see myself using to introduce students to symbolism, general visual literacy, and collaboration in the art room.
This website also introduced me to a site called “Creative Connections.” This is a large online gallery that allows students and educators from all over the world to participate in and create exhibits with their original work to be displayed on their website. I have seen similar sites to this one, but this site seems well organized with how each exhibition is separated and labeled. I could see myself asking my students to participate in this site. Not every student can be in the art show or sent to the Teen Arts Festival, so this is a great alternative for students or have students work published on a larger scale.
Overall, I think “Teachers’ Guide to Global Collaboration” is a wonderful way for teachers and students to collaborate beyond the small world of their classrooms. It is convenient and easy to navigate. I could see myself using this website to not only join projects created by other teachers, but also possibly to create a long term project for my students or school community to get involved in. I noticed the site does not have many projects that are long term with rolling registration, so I would love to contribute to that some day.
CLICK HERE TO ACCESS A RANGE OF ORGANIZATIONS AND PROJECTS TO COLLABORATE WITH OR START YOUR OWN!
Thank you for reading!
Follow me on Twitter at @IreneOrtiz001