Expanding Educational Landscapes

As I embark on the journey of becoming a Flat Classroom Certified Teacher, I feel that I first must contemplate my own flat existence.  I recently moved to Raleigh, North Carolina from Las Vegas, Nevada, because my husband got a job in Raleigh.  The irony is that he is working for a Swiss company and the engineering work he is doing is in California where he is designing substations for PG & E (the California utility company).  For me the move meant making the tough decision to leave an amazing  CTE Magnet school, West Career and Technical Academy,  where I taught an innovative class called Computer-Based Projects that I had poured my heart and soul into developing.  But it also represented a chance to reboot, recharge, and try something new.  The online school that I have taught for part time for many years in Las Vegas has asked me to continue teaching online courses, so I will be teaching English from North Carolina to Las Vegas high schoolers.    And now my husband’s company has just asked him to go to Germany for 6 months, so I will be teaching Las Vegas students from Germany.  Yes, the flat world has arrived making it all the more apparent that the Flat Classroom movement of pushing global collaboration in education is becoming essential.  The Flat Classroom Certified teacher program is run by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay, two rock star educational innovators. It has been set up to promote global collaboration amongst educators and the creation of global collaboration projects.  Over the next 14 weeks I will have the opportunity to work with like-minded educators from around the globe who feel passionate about global collaboration and connection and will develop my own global collaboration project.  We have been asked this week to ponder what ‘flattening the classroom’ and ‘flat learning’ means.  In the text for this class, Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds, Vicki and Julie state, “we believe effective use of technology can build bridges between classrooms, nations, and humankind, and that 21st Century skills harness not only the power of technology but the power of people.” (p. 2) For me, ‘flattening the classroom’ and ‘flat learning’ are about utilizing technology to expand the audience, the connections, the activities, the outcomes and the learning landscapes to make learning more meaningful, efficient, collaborative, and representative of the flattened work environment that students will enter in their future.  The idea of the flat world is based on Thomas Friedman’s seminal work, The World Is Flat, and the 10 flatteners he describes that have shaped how we do business and everything else in our connected, global society.  I have been fortunate to be involved in several Flat Classroom Projects with my students as well as other global projects that I have designed such as the Congo Design Challenge, so I am starting this certification program from a place of experience.  As Julie and Vicki said it is the power of technology and people.  I am most excited about making new connections with the people in this course that will hopefully lead to opportunities for future collaboration and partnerships.  Yet, I wouldn’t be able to do this so easily without the technology.  I am thrilled to see where this exploration of the Flat Classroom and global collaboration takes me and since my own flat existence is taking me to Germany, I may even get to have some face to face time with my flat classroom instructors and classmates at the Flat Classroom Conference 2012 being held in Dusseldorf, Germany in December.
It’s been about 6 years since I first discovered the Flat Classroom Project and Vicki Davis’ Cool Cat Teacher Blog. Back then Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis were two classroom teachers teaching halfway across the world (Julie in Bangladesh at the time and Vicki in Camille, Georgia) who tried a global experiment with their classrooms based on Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, that turned out to be a powerful collaboration that has developed into an educational movement dedicated to global collaboration and digital citizenship.  I have had students involved in Flat Classroom Projects for the past 3-4 years and embedded their model deeply in my curriculum as I developed the course Computer-Based Projects at West Career and Technical Academy.  Getting students to use digital technologies in academically appropriate ways that require collaboration with global partners is at the heart of the Flat Classroom Model.