Collaboration Birds of a Feather

Paul Hieronymus, Lorain County Distance Learning Consortium, is facilitating this session on collaborative projects.

Resources mentioned in the sharing:

• TWICE Projects page
• CILC Collaboration Center
• Collaboration Collage Listserv
• My classes: Planning Interactive Curriculum Connects & Kid2Kid Connections.
  
• SAXophone
• Internet2 K20 Initiative
  

Projects people have:

• Paul is doing "storytime" with teachers who haven't done a VC before. They read a story for 20 min. and then do some conversation. It's for k-2 classes. The teachers just have to mute and unmute the mic, and call on kids. Paul reads the story and asks them questions about the book. He uses it as a recruitment tool to get teachers hooked.
• Susan Altgelt shared the Texas Connects project which can be replicated in other states.
  
• Rowena shared information about iEARN.
• I talked about Read Across America, MysteryQuest World, and MysteryQuest USA.
  

Rutgers Camden, the Indy Zoo, and COSI Toledo, are all interested in doing programs that include collaborations between schools in their programming. I think there's certainly room for content providers to facilitate projects.... the more ideas people have & share the more VCs we can all do!

The conversation also centered around doing cluster projects where classes connect to a content provider and then continue connecting to each other for similar projects in the future.

Paul shared how they are doing problem based learning projects - giving students a big problem - usually related to environmental problem - and then presenting solutions to the experts. CILC has a Community Partnerships program to do these types of projects too that includes grants and partnerships to make these types of events happen.

Not surprisingly, someone brought up the issue of increasing student test scores. iEARN has research on their PD page on how their projects improve student learning. Another person suggested focusing on communication skills that businesses are looking for. We also discussed how the events need to be meaningful and tied to higher level thinking skills.

Paul has a VC Classifieds page with good ideas to get the word out with his teachers.

Robyn Phillips shared information about a project they are planning for Veterans Day connecting with a marine in Iraq. They are working through the Freedom Calls Foundation.

What a fun session sharing connections. Now we