On Thursday, the 5th of July, Educate Magis organized a Questions and Answers session on Connected Classrooms.

In this session, teachers had the opportunity to exchange ideas in order to bring a fun and educational experience to their students, by connecting with students from Jesuit schools in other parts of the world.

We would like to share some of the ideas and recommendations shared in this session. If you have any questions or would like to participate in the next Questions and Answers session for Connected Classrooms, please leave a message in the Chat Box located inside of the Connected Classrooms Questions & Answers Virtual Classroom.

What did we learn?

•  We learnt about the importance of offering our students these global experiences. Especially in order to teach them global competencies, such as:
  • Respect and value diversity
  • Environmental consciousness
  • Respect human rights
  • Value of dialogue
  • Democratic participation
  • Co-responsibility and Commitment
• How to use the tool? We did a demonstration on how to explore the classes which have already been created by other teachers, how to join a class, how to accept new participants, how to share the class with others and how to set up a new virtual connection within a virtual classroom.
• The tool can be used in different ways – for example:
  • To bring communicators from different Jesuit schools together to plan collaborative work together every month.
  • To connect two classrooms so that students can interact and get to know each other.
  • To connect more than two classes to share and learn from others (Important: if there are more than 5/6 people or more than two classrooms on a virtual connection it’s important to have a moderator to facilitate the connection).
  • To create virtual connections to support classes who have an in-person exchange programme for students.
• We also spoke about things which should be taken into account before organizing a virtual connection:
  • Talk to and coordinate with the other teacher before the live connection with students.
  • Be aware of the spatial organization before connecting (have the students sit close to the computer)
  • Plan the amount of time each student will talk for.
  • It is important to begin with something simple, for example have the students introduce themselves, present their schools, etc.
• Additional recommendations which were discussed in the session:
  • In order to collaborate at a global level, we must be creative – if the timing doesn’t work out for a live connection one could record short videos / work on a project separately and then share the responses or results afterwards.
  • Do more sessions like this one.
  • Invite teachers to attend virtual connections with their students, which would be facilitated by Educate Magis in order to give the teachers (and students) a chance to learn how to use the tool and so they are not apprehensive about using it.
  • We can learn a lot listening to or Reading about other peoples’ experiences – we all learnt something from this session. It would be good to share short videos (or articles) explaining how the tool is being used.
  • Combine Connected Classrooms with asynchronous tools, for example: a blog
  • We could use the interactive map to “visit” a school before we connect with them virtually.
  • Take into account that this tool and this way of working is very new for many teachers, and for many students.
• In one example, we heard about a virtual connection which didn’t work out because of the time difference, however Connected Classrooms was a way to connect a school in Brazil with a school in Australia and gave the schools the opportunity to organize a project together. This worked very well and in the next semester the students would like to connect via live video connection on Connected Classrooms (although this means that one class will need to arrive very early in the morning and one will need to stay in school later) but the students are very enthusiastic about this and would like to do it. In this example, the students worked on a project on the topic of natural disasters and in the virtual connection they would like to share the results.

Given the discussions we had in this session, the need arose to create some activity templates/guidelines for teachers to use during their Connected Classrooms. To develop these activity guides and virtual classroom templates we invite the global community to share ideas and suggestions here.

This session was a very positive experience for all the participants, it was very enriching to share personal experiences and meet other teachers from the global community.

During the month of August, we will host another session. If you are interested in participating in the next session please join this classroom “Connected Classroom Questions & Answers” and leave us a comment in the Chat Box. Thank you very much!