Thursday, February 05, 2009

Eracism: Accolades for student visionaries


After a week of international voting we are pleased to announce the results of the student project from the Flat Classroom Conference held in Qatar last week.

As a background to this, the Student Summit participants at the conference (40 from all parts of the world) were given the challenge of envisioning the next Flat Classroom Project. Very briefly this is what they went through over the 3 days:

Day 1: Meet and greet team members (4 students per team), exchange cultural ideas and start to brainstorm ideas for their project.

Day 2: Worked in teams all day with 2 sessions where teachers and students joined for project idea feedback and final voting of the 'winning' teams.
- Group session 1: Teams pitched their ideas to tables of teachers who then provided feedback via a rubric. Time allowed for 3 x rotations so each team had 3 lots of feedback ontheir project ideas.
- Group session 2: Each team presented their ideas via a multimedia and vocal presentation. Supporting material had also been put on a wiki, some created PPTs, some even got a rough video together. All team memebrs spoke about their ideas in an attempt to convince us theirs was the best.

Day 3: The 4 winning teams had until 2:30 to create their multimedia artifact to try and show what their project was really all about. These were then played at teh conference closing session, put on the Ning and international voting encouraged.

Now: The results!
Congratulations to Eracism and students from wiki team 4 Nastassja, John, Yaqsan, Antonia
In their words: "Our aim is to give teenagers all over the world an opportunity to express their opinions and ideas about issues in the current world."

Students - although one group officially "won" - you are ALL the winners. We are both so thrilled with the amazing work you've done - your engagement on the Ning and belief that we can build the bridges today through the Internet that society of tomorrow can walk across!

The Eracism group has officially won the competition and we will be working through the details to begin this project probably in August/ September of 2009. Stay posted on the Ning as we work with this - if you'd like to volunteer to work with this project, all students who attended this year's conference are invited to be a member of the "Advisory Board" for Eracism - we will create a group on the Ning - just join the group.

Additionally, Face Poverty and TechTrust have elements that we are currently incorporating into the 2010 conference and hope to announce within the next few months - we hope that the students on this project will consider being involved in the Student Advisory group for the 2010 conference. Artistmatic has some math teachers thinking about how this idea can help math education and we are discussing and searching for some math teachers around the world to help implement an educational network around using creativity to teach math.

Whether you realize it or not, each student group has fundamentally contributed to the ideas of what CAN be done to flatten classrooms in meaningful ways that improve our world! The conference has transformed all of us who saw just what students could do in a project based conference environment and we are working behind the scenes to improve and include more classes in the future.

Right now, we encourage all students to submit videos for the Net Gen Education Challenge with Don Tapscott and we are still looking for more teams to be involved in the Net Gen Ed Project to kick off in two weeks. Please encourage and ask your teachers to join in the project.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very useful information for students.