In Search of Global Collaborators for the new School Year

If you are a teacher of students that fit category #1 or #3 below and are interested in a global project with my Spanish students, please read this post and follow the instructions at the end to contact me.  (I plan to do other collaboration projects within the United States also, but I first would like to get the new project started.) 


Before school started last August, I had written a list of personal goals that I wanted to accomplish during the 2011-12 school year.  One of them was to collaborate with other classes in the world.  I was looking for three specific categories:
1 - Students in English-speaking countries learning Spanish (like my students).
2 - Students in non-English speaking countries learning Spanish.
3 - Native Spanish-speaking students in Spanish countries learning English.


A student in my class made the bulletin board (see photo) of a map of the world and yarn stretching to the countries that our class connected with. We were able to find students from each category above for 4 different projects.  In addition, if I had a culture-related question, I was fortunate enough to receive responses to those questions from teachers in Uruguay (the yarn fell off that country in the photo above), Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, and several other countries.


For the first three projects, we used VoiceThread.  In project #1, students from Seoul, Korea and Taiwan left responses.  In project #2, students from Mexico and Spain left answers. For project #3, the teacher from Taiwan started his own VoiceThread and several of my students added comments to his VoiceThread.
first project 
second project 
third project 
The 4th project was more interactive and personal because my students used Skype, FaceTime, Edmodo, and Mindomo to communicate and work with students from Argentina.  My students enjoyed learning more about Argentina and spending time talking to them.  Some of them changed usernames to play videogames against each other.


These collaborations were so successful that months before school ended, I began working on a new idea for global collaboration next year.  Once again I am looking for students in categories #1 and #3 above.  My idea is to do some type of Quad-Blogging with a mix of students from different English-speaking countries (New Zealand, England, Australia, Canada, etc.) and students from Spanish-speaking countries that are studying English.  I have contacted several teachers and plan to make more firm plans on this project during July and early August.  If you are a teacher of students from categories #1 or #3 above and are interested in hearing more about the Quad-Blogging, please leave a message in the comments below with your e-mail, or contact me at: cynthia_hitz@yahoo.com.


I'm looking forward to meeting new teachers and working on a Global Project with my new students this fall!