Teachers can create a social networking project for a class and collaborate online at almost no cost. "Educators don't need huge budgets to develop a global-education program. One of the best examples of this is a partnership called the Flat Classroom Project that started by connecting an international school in Dhaka, Bangladesh, with an American school in Camilla, Georgia, and has since expanded into a seven-school collaborative."
I did something similar in 1989 before the birth of the web as we know it today. National Geographic was looking for schools to collaborate and implement a Pen Pal project using email. Schools that applied only needed one computer with dial-up access that would connect to National Geographic headquarters who would then continue sending the emails to another school in the world.
As a new media specialist at West Miami Middle School, a school with a large ESOL population, I thought this project would motivate the students to improve their reading and writing skills. The 8th grade students at West Miami Middle were paired with 8th grade students in a school in Canada. Their assignment was to write to these Canadian students about who they were, where they live, what they like to eat, what music they enjoy, etc.
The results were that students wanted to impress their peers and therefore became diligent in accurately spelling and constructing meaningful paragraphs. Since this was new technology at the time, students became aware of the world beyond their own backyard. They felt special that a stranger their age, from somewhere else in the world, was interested in communicating with them.
We've come a long way since 1989 but educators have yet to harness the power of the Web and use it in their classrooms as a teaching tool. Some of us are just starting to do so and trying to catch up. Students, meanwhile, are the ones using the web and constructing new technologies to communicate with each other worldwide.
