Global Cooperation is important in education for many reasons. To be educated is to understand a variety of subjects on a variety of levels. Perhaps the most important key to becoming educated is having access - now more than ever we have access to countless opportunities as educators and as students. These opportunities allow us to communicate with classrooms from around the world and share ideas with each other. They allow our students to participate in a non-traditional style of learning, where sharing language and work with students from thousands of miles away is as easy as the push of a button - literally.
The first website I explored was
http://www.epals.com/. It is ideal for teachers who want their students to communicate with students from different places, be it around the world or just around the nation. I created a profile about myself and entered information about who I would be interested in linking my students up with. I currently teach level 1 Spanish, so I wanted to find a classroom of native Spanish speakers from Chile that would be interested in exchanging emails with my students, in an effort to improve their writing and comprehension skills. However, after inputting my information, I received a list of ESL teachers in Chile that were looking for native English students to share emails with their Spanish students who are learning English. Not exactly what I was looking for, but when I mentioned it to the teacher that I share a room with at school (who happens to be an English teacher), he LOVED the idea of his students writing these emails to the Chilean students. As I tried to continue my search of finding a match for what I wanted, I encountered a few site errors: when I would click on certain things it would say, "Internet Explorer cannot open this page...". So I moved on, and I did find links to setting up email, blogs, forums with
detailed lesson plans from teachers, and culture activity/project ideas. Overall, I would go back to the site, work out the kinks, and
definitely use this as a tool in my teaching style and curriculum.
The other site I explored was
http://www.iearn.org/. This was a fantastic international resource tool - especially because I chose to use the Spanish version. I clicked on Argentina and got TELAR -
todos estamos en la RED. This means "We are all on the Internet" in Spanish. TELAR promotes the pedagogical use of new technologies of communication and collaboration of national and international projects for students (
http://www.iearn.org/). There were tons of project ideas on the site for Spanish teachers. A few of my favorites:
1.) Mi escuela, tu escuela - students search for information about the school systems of a foreign country and compare and contrast the different aspects to their own school.
2.) La familia - students exchange information with another student from a foreign country about family life and present a report about the similarities and differences to that of their own.
3.) Ositos de peluche - This is a creative writing tool for the students, but it takes some effort on the part of the teacher. One class gets a teddy bear and inserts messages from each student inside. The teacher then sends the bear to the cooperating classroom (ideally in another country) and that teacher opens the bear and the students read the messages. The students then send responses to the first classroom back, and the bear acts as the messenger.
I realize there are lots of websites that offer teachers project ideas such as this one, but I liked ilearn because of 2 main reasons: 1) it offers loads of project ideas in Spanish and 2) the wesite promotes peace, humanity, and working together as a means for doing the projects with your students in the first place. I would definately use this website in the future.
Overall, I was extremely satisified with these 2 websites because I really took something away from each of them, and I would definitly use them with my own students.
