ISTE Coaching Standard 3: Digital Age Learning Environments Indicator 3g

Use digital communication and collaboration tools to communicate locally and globally with students, parents, peers, and the larger community

ISTE Coaching Standards (2014)

Resonant Idea: Local and global communication & collaboration

One of the areas where technology can shift the paradigm in education is by opening the world to students. With a tap or a click, students can interact real-time with experts or communities in need, collaborate with other students across the world, or access a trove of resources on any topic. 

In my post Global Collaborator, I described the benefits of global collaboration, tools and websites that support it, best practices for a successful experience, and obstacles that can prevent teachers from trying it. 

My Global Collaboration community engagement project (published privately) consisted of working with a second grade teacher to design a virtual field trip to the Victoria Bug Zoo, which supported the class’ science unit on insects. This is a Title 1 school where many students may not have opportunities to go to a zoo, particularly one in Canada. Students were transfixed as the expert from the bug zoo held insects up to the camera and explained various facts about their life cycles and habitat. Students showed their learning through a quick assessment afterward. 

The following year, as part of a peer coaching project, I worked with the same teacher to arrange a virtual field trip with the Vancouver Aquarium to learn about penguins. This one was less impressive than the Bug Zoo, but mainly because it was upstaged by a live virtual visit the class had the day before with an actual penguin researcher in the Antarctic!  

Both projects led me on a journey to find the best experience that would support the curriculum and class schedule. I also arranged virtual meetings with a high school robotics club in Maryland for several of my 4th grade computer science classes. These virtual visits weren’t as good as being there in person, but would have been impossible to do otherwise. They opened my eyes and those of the teacher I worked with to the possibilities of using technology to expand what students experience in the classroom.

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