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Learning through trial and error in the global classroom
Windows to the world are what the Internet brings to the classroom, but what happens when kids don't want to look through these windows? By Janice Friesen |
 am
fascinated by the idea of a global classroom. At a
conference in 1992, I heard David Thornburg, author of Edutrends
2021, speak about what the World Wide Web was going to do for
schools. He talked about schools having windows to the world.
Opening the classroom to the world in the ways described by this
author sounded really interesting. The classroom with windows to
the world is a great idea, but it didn't seem real.
I began to think it may become reality when our school was networked in 1996. We are connected to a wide area network (WAN) with a T1 connection, which allows us to have fast access to anywhere in the world. |
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 ur
spring International Fair seemed like a great place to try
out these windows to the world. Each year parents from many
different places and ancestries volunteer to turn classrooms into
different countries. Then students travel from country to country
with passports, seeing, tasting, and collecting stamps. It is one of the
most entertaining evenings of the school year, and there is no
problem with low attendance. Last year, I thought we could do something very interesting and set up the computer lab as a place to cyber-travel anywhere in the world. Each computer station was set up to travel to a different country via bookmarks in Netscape. The countries were marked with flags on top of the computers. I was thrilled. I thought that students would come and check out all of the pictures and places displayed and make a real connection with other parts of the world. I was wrong. In retrospect, it makes sense that students were more excited by tasting things from different countries, by making Dutch hats and shoes, by touching and seeing many colorful objects brought to share in the non-cyber rooms. Netscape required waiting for pictures to download and lots of reading. It took time. It was not really interactive. The students were just opening a bookmark that I had set up for them. There was no interaction with another person. The students who came to see the room had no ownership of what was being shown that evening. Doing this was an eye-opener for me. I now needed to reconsider my enthusiasm about the idea of a classroom with windows to the world. Does it matter that these windows are available if students aren't interested in looking out? How can we get their interest? Or am I trying to do this with students who are not ready? |
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decided
to try a different approach. I had read about an idea
in an issue of Learning and Leading with
Technology. It described a project where participants
from other countries were paired with students, and then, after
getting to know them through an introductory e-mail message, they
spent time learning in traditional ways (books and encyclopedias)
about the other country. The students then wrote a paper entitled "A
Day in the Life of (name of keypal)" and sent a copy of it to their
partner to see how close their impressions from books were to what
real life in another country is like. This gave the other student a
chance to critique the paper and send back some writing about what
it really is like. I decided to try this. I applied to teach a summer school class called the Global Classroom. To prepare for it I posted a specific proposal for the class on Kidsphere (an international teachers' listserve) asking for participation. I was excited when I got a message from an Australian teacher saying that his students were "keen" to participate in the project. He had each of his students send in their own registration. It was fun to see them come in over the next few weeks. Then I got a response from South Africa and several from other summer schools here in the states. By the end of May I had enough responses that I felt sure I could match up my students with partners. I felt that connections with any place would be interesting. Although I was attracted to the far away and exotic places, I tried not to be disappointed with the prospect of communicating with someone nearby. |
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 inally,
class began. I taught two sections of students going
into fourth and fifth grade and had a total of 22 students. We used our
time for several things. First the students did their research on
the country they had chosen and wrote their "A Day in the Life of
______" paragraph. Since most of these students were doing the first
research project in their lives and were not fast at keyboarding,
I felt a paragraph was enough.We edited each until it was perfect. They wrote their paragraphs using word processing, and then, when they had written exactly what they wanted to send, the messages were copied and pasted into e-mail messages. The senders explained that this was their impression and they would like to know if it was correct. |
 any of the
messages we sent
immediately bounced back to us. By the time that this happened we
were done with class for the first day, so I worked on the problem
after school.The next day I explained to the students that the messages bounced back because a group of the students who registered had forgotten one word in their e-mail addresses. We corrected the problem and re-sent the message. Because the messages bounced back we didn't have to retype everything. We just edited the bounced back message and forwarded it to the correct address. |
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Where to locate key pals: Classroom Connect: http://www.classroom.net/ Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Communication (IECC) Web site: http://www.stolaf.edu/network/iecc/ Kidsphere--International mailing list for educators. Subscribe by sending e-mail to kidsphere-request@vms.cis.pitt.edu Type: subscribe kidsphere (your name) in the body of the message. This is an active list--50 or more messages a day on interesting topics from all over the world is common. Teacher's Edition Online: http://www.teachnet.com/ Global School Net: http://www.gsn.org/ KidLin--Aimed at kids ages 10-15: http://www.kidlink.org/english/society/listeam.html/ |
 few students
got responses to their e-mail in the first few
days. Anne, who had matched up with someone from Mississippi,
communicated the most with her keypal. I thought she would be
disappointed to have a partner from such a similar location (we are
in Missouri), but it turned out that she had the easiest and most
frequent communication. Anne enjoyed writing and receiving e-mail,
and she learned quite a bit.The other students waited and waited. Each day I told them to send a short message even if they had not received mail. A week went by. We had not received one message from our whole class of Australian students who were "keen" to write. What was going wrong? Then we began our research about the countries. Someone found a list of school holidays in Australia on an Australian Web page. Guess what?! Our Australian partners were on vacation for the first week of our summer school! The students also worked on a display about their country. I encouraged them to be creative and to make it meaningful for anyone who saw it. It was good to have this non-technical activity to compliment all of the work we were doing on computers. They collected information and maps from books, encyclopedias, an online encyclopedia, and the World Wide Web. Each display took on a character of its own. One student requested a refrigerator box and created scenes from Australia inside. These scenes could be viewed from windows cut in the box. Someone else did a doll house with a Bulgarian theme. She had stories about what life in Bulgaria was really like, including characters represented by dolls she brought. She tried to make it authentic, even including an outhouse! Another boy, who was extremely interested in auto racing and had a keypal from the Poconos Mountains in Pennsylvania used the WWW to find out about auto races there. He posted the information on his display. Others were more traditional and made flags and maps out of construction paper. |
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ne Friday
morning at 8 a.m., I received an e-mail
communication from the teacher in Australia. He said that they were
still on vacation and would write to us as soon as they got back. His
letter had been written on Friday at 11 a.m. . . . after I received it!!
At our class meeting that morning I told the kids about this and we
had a very real lesson in the International Date Line and time zones.
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had planned
to introduce them to Netscape searching as a way
for them to find information about their countries. On the second
day, I did a demonstration for them which introduced them to the
search engines on Netscape and then I let them search on their own
for their individual information. It was much harder for them than I
thought it would be. The Web had expanded since I had
used it in the end of May, and there were different search engines
working each time they started. Each engine found tens of thousands
of pages on the subject entered, and it was very hard to tell which
one really would be helpful. Sometimes students went around in
circles. Laura wanted to find out what type of pets people had in
Australia. She tried searching for Australia and pets, but always
ended up with a list of pet pages that were not specific at all. Not only can searching the Web be frustrating, there are also pages on the Web not suited to students. I warned my class, but, of course, it happened to one of my shy students. He found a naked body somewhere and then he followed my directions to press the back button to get out of there. When he got home he told his parents how embarrassed he was when he found the page. His father came and talked to me the next morning. He was very supportive, but it became clear that Net-searching with this age student was not productive. At this point I prepared some 3x5 cards with URLs and I taught them to type in addresses. I had the 3x5 cards available for anyone who wanted to use Netscape. In other circumstances (if we had all been doing the same thing, or if I had more time) I might have set up bookmarks for the sites they needed. I have since learned about a search engine designed to allow kids to surf safely called Yahooligans. The contents of this search are screened with kids in mind and it is all organized in a way that is kid-friendly. |
 y the end
of the second week we began to get responses from
our keypals in Australia. They had received our "Day in the Life"
stories and responded. It was fun for all of the kids to get mail, but
there were only four more days of school. Almost everyone exchanged
e-mail at least once. Some talked of continuing to do e-mail from
home. Others who did not have computers said they might continue
with snail mail.
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 e ended
the class with a reception for parents where they
could come to see the displays the students had created, try out
e-mail and the WWW, and taste recipes from the different countries
we studied. We had hoped to get recipes from our partners, but most
of the students didn't correspond long enough ahead of time and had
no recipe before the reception, so we used international recipe books
to get ideas.All of the students this summer had a chance to learn how to do e-mail and get a taste of the possibilities of connecting to far away places. Many had assumptions challenged, like one student who told me that he thought Australia was always hot. He was surprised to learn from his keypal that it was now winter there and where she lived in the mountains it was below freezing in the morning! Some students wrote more and did it more willingly than they ever had before. One student, who told me at the beginning that her mother had signed her up for this and that she hated writing and would not write, ended up publishing an e-mail newsletter that was sent out to everyone in the class a few times. Having a complementary non-technical element was helpful. If the technology didn't work there was always something productive to work on. The two sides of the project balanced each other well. The kids used the Web and word processing to find and create things for their displays. Their displays helped them to learn about their keypal. |
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n spite of
everything not going totally according to plan, I feel
that the summer school was a great success. All of the students had
their horizons expanded. Why was this experience different than the
cyber-travel at our school International Fair? I think because it was
rounded out with many different experiences cyber and non-cyber
and it included communication with the other countries. Kids just do
not get excited about a machine with a picture of France on it, even
if you explain to them that the picture is actually coming to them in
real time from France. They are excited about real communication
with real people from other places and about chances to display
what they are learning in creative ways. Maybe on a future
International Fair night students can be in charge of a Web site. They
could set up a special page just for that night with links to places
that they have found and want to share.
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