Opening Up Education - Student's Rise to the Challenge

Before they all gathered in Mumbai for the Flat Classroom Workshop @ASB Unplugged 2012, these 40 students had not met face-to-face except for those in their immediate school. The content of this workshop challenged them to imagine how to 'open up education' to make it accessible, equal, more engaging, technology-focused, interdisciplinary and collaborative.
Students worked in mixed-classroom Teams, on a 3-day Program following a process that involved brainstorming, pitching initial ideas for feedback. Virtual team members also interacted via the backchannel and had a window into the workshop via the uStream channel.

Each student team was challenged by the Action Project that asked them to brainstorm, envision, and propose (“pitch”) a flat-classroom style project to promote awareness and improvement of the workshop theme, ‘Opening Up Education’. Each team pitched on a rotation basis to tables of educators for feedback, they then refined their proposal and created a final 'animatic' presentation. Finally the top 4 teams were chose to spend the last day further developing their ideas into a 3 min. video that clearly shared their proposal as an advertisement or as a scenario in the future where it was already happening. The students who did not make a final team video joined together and produced the 30-min closing ceremony.
A big thank you to Kim Cofino for co-leading the workshop this year, and to David Deeds and Rebekah Madrid for helping with facilitation. It is always good to get new ideas and have a team that is dedicated to making this the best experience ever for everyone involved.

After a 2-week international vote, Team 4 with 'Jack our the Books' has been recognized as having the idea most likely to succeed.

Team 4 - Jack out the Books

Comment on their video on the Flat Classroom Conference Ning.


Find more videos like this on Flat Classroom Conference

See also Team 3 'Mathzilla', Team 5 'Team VIS', and Team 7 'The Educators' videos. In addition other media created by the closing ceremony team includes ASB 2012, Flat Classroom in One Word, and Last Video!

More pictures at key stages during the workshop follow. (My favourite pics!)

David, Julie, Kim and Rebekah

U-Streaming the Workshop

Team Work!

Students 'pitching' their ideas for feedback

Violet facilitating the uStream - iPhone and water bottles!

Closing Ceremony - Students presenting

Closing Ceremony - Students presenting

All of us!

Do you want to join a Flat Classroom Workshop, or come to a Flat Classroom Conference in the future? We will be announcing our locations for 2013-14 very soon. Come and join us on the Flat Classroom Conference Ning and get updates.

A big thank you to the American School of Bombay for hosting the conference, and also a big thank you to Think Global School for their support and to Pearson in India for providing copies of our book to participants in the Digiteacher Workshop.