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ISTE Standard: Global Collaborator
ISTE Standard: Global Collaborator
Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally.
Students use digital tools to connect with learners from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, engaging with them in ways that broaden mutual understanding and learning.
Students use collaborative technologies to work with others, including peers, experts, or community members to examine issues and problems from multiple viewpoints.
Students contribute constructively to project teams, assuming various roles and responsibilities to work effectively toward a common goal.
Students explore local and global issues and use collaborative technologies to work with others to investigate solutions.
Global Collaboration
Global Collaboration
Global communication is a remarkable phenomenon, and we've probably just begun to scratch the surface of its effects on humanity. Just a couple of decades ago, the average person wanting to speak with someone on the other side of the planet had access to very few options (if any). For an American elementary school student in the 90s, for example, old issues of National Geographic may have been the best available indication of what life was like beyond driving distance.
Thankfully, we can do better for our students now—and if we want to have any kind of future, we need to do better. If we care about global issues, we can't neglect the potential of global collaboration in our schools. Rather than working with a pool of collaborators dictated by who is in the room with us at the time, we can work alongside people we will never meet in person. Rather than simply learning about cultures we don't belong to, we can learn from them and with them.
Teachers' Guide to Global Collaboration
Teachers' Guide to Global Collaboration
The Teachers' Guide to Global Collaboration (or Teachers' Guide to Global, Collaborative Teaching and Learning) is a hub for teachers who want to use, generate, or share international learning projects. It was created by the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN), a massive online non-profit network for K-12 educators. This is more than a collection of cool lesson plans and activities; the Teachers' Guide has an expansive catalog of projects and networks to help teachers enable their students to do globally collaborative work. There is a catalogue of global projects, including art exchanges, writers' rooms, learning circles, to name a few. There are also dozens of resources for teachers: professional development opportunities, curriculum guides, online communities, and so on.
Education is a wonderful thing, but our educational institutions have a big problem with the idea of purpose. Students often wonder why they're being asked to do the work they're being asked to do, and the traditional answers range from disheartening to infuriating. There is no magic bullet to solve this problem, but collaboration can be one decisive step in the right direction. Public education in the United States continues to over-emphasize individual work for individual credit, reproducing an overly competitive and isolating model of society. Collaborative work requires us to build proficiencies that have no real place in independent work. Unless we want our students to enter the adult world from a position of self-obsession and needless antagonism, collaborative skills like negotiation, empathy, and listening are positively essential. We've never been in a better position to support our students in developing these skills cross-culturally.
My Recommendation
This website is a brilliant starting point for teachers looking to connect their students with the world beyond the walls of their classrooms. ISTE's "Global Collaborator" standard may as well have been written with this website in mind, given the site's broad range of opportunities for remote collaboration. A teacher in practically any subject area should be able to find ways to support their students in working with peers outside of their community. The benefits and challenges will differ depending on which specific tools and projects a teacher decides to use—but that complexity could provide an opportunity for the teacher to practice the same kinds of cooperative proficiencies they want to nurture in their students.
TL;DR
If you aren't completely sure about how to engage your students in globally collaborative work, use this website. (If you are completely sure about how to do that, maybe submit a resource to the website instead.)
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