In a district with more than 20,000 students set right on the banks of the Microsoft campus in Bellevue, Washington, a natural goal seems to be getting everyone to speak the same language when it comes to school direction and cohesion.

Ironically though, this district is home to students literally speaking more than 117 languages.

“Just at Ardmore, we have students speaking 37 or 38 languages, which gives you a picture of how diverse our school is,” says Yusra Obaid, Principal of Ardmore Elementary School, who was recently recognized for her leadership with a Tech & Learning Innovative Leader Award.

Bellevue School District not only celebrates that reality, but builds on their beautiful blend of cultures and backgrounds with a global competency initiative. One element of this is the Multilingualism for All language programs that include both Spanish and Mandarin programs, with unique language opportunities in Arabic, Korean, and Hindi. BSD middle and highschoolers can take Arabic, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Spanish.

“Students learn the majority of their day in English, with an hour and 20 minutes of daily Arabic instruction in language arts with additional translanguaging throughout the day,” says Obaid. “If you walk into our Arabic classroom, you can't tell the difference between it and a general ed classroom. Half of our classes are multi-language learners. The vision of Ardmore is to affirm and identify this idea that our kids come to us speaking either one or multiple languages. We provide opportunity for those kids and make sure that any students who don't speak another language at home can learn in some way or form here.”

That vision is creating results.

“There is a science where students learning a new language at an early age tend to do better in math, science and overall academics,” says Obaid. “This is an accelerated program because kids are actually learning two languages at the same time, which places extra cognitive demands on students. It helps shape their brain in a different way.”

Using Tech Translates to Success

While many of the students come from backgrounds in which they learned languages naturally in the home, it never hurts to use the latest tech to aid acquisition.

“There's a range of tools that make learning more accessible to kids, even language learning,” says Obaid, noting BDS is a Microsoft district. “We know a lot about language acquisition and students learn by repetition and visuals. Our teachers use our whiteboard touch screens in an interactive way to have kids repeat the language. They press on it and can hear the word pronounced. They do image and word matching, they annotate specific words, drag and blend certain letters together — it’s created an accessibility for language learning in general.”

Obaid says these platforms bring together the four different domains of language acquisition (listening, reading, writing and speaking) more effectively than simple worksheets.

The program creates language learners, but also has a bigger picture of enhancing global citizenship.

“When kids come to us, we want to create global citizens who are thinking not just about their local community, but the larger world and their impact on it,” says Obaid. “We want to create that sense of community that our actions affect others not only here in Bellevue, but in the world.”

Obaid has integrated the Global Goals of UN Sustainability framework across grade levels to support this effort on a daily basis.

For example, for first grade, it offers a literacy unit about animals focused on building vocabulary about endangered animals. “They learned about all the animals and then focused on elephants. ‘How do we protect elephants? They're being endangered,’” says Obaid. “Students learned about dangers involved in their habitat, and then raised money and adopted elephants which they continue to nurture and care about. The organization sent a certificate and they have a website with a live camera feed.”

Using technology to connect a lesson to the real world still continues to be effective.

“It's really cool to just see kids thinking, ‘Wow, we learned about this, and now we actually did something that helped this animal survive those dangers in a place on the other side of the world,’" says Obaid.

3 Tips on Creating Global Initiatives in the Classroom

Obaid offers this advice to other educators:

1. Don't wait to make change. “We can get stuck in a place of ‘It has to be perfect, do I have the funding?’” she says, emphasizing the importance of partnering with students and families to learn their aspirations and goals. “Languages and global citizenship were important for our families, so we didn’t wait for things to happen, we just acted by starting with simple things and letting it grow.”

2. Community partnership is huge. “Look within the community for expertise, rather than thinking about outside resources,” Obaid says. “Shifting that idea to where is capacity and expertise within our whole community — our families, our teachers, everybody who walks through our building are potential partners.”

3. Engage all stakeholders right from the start. Assess, adjust, and collect feedback with everything that you do to demonstrate the success for stakeholders. “When something is innovative and new, partnering with the people who you're serving the most helps,” she says. “We have listening sessions. We collect numerical data. We listen to stories from kids. We do empathy interviews. This is how we continue to refine and adjust anything that we bring into our school.”

Finding Local Funding for Global Awareness

The thought of tapping already-stretched budgets for bonus initiatives can be intimidating, but the adage of “use your resources” certainly applies.

“When we think about innovation and change with a financial aspect, sometimes we forget about the open resources, the free availability, the opportunities in our local community that exist where we can make connections,” Obaid says.

The first grade project which made such an impact on the students was born of a simple wildlife trust website and adoption program. Local fundraising helped with the rest.

“Tapping areas of expertise and opportunities within our local community might not necessarily include a direct financial aspect, but are still very valuable,” she says. “It's about relevance. It's about connection. It's about kids thinking, ‘Wow, what I'm learning matters, and I can do something.’ It's not always about money.”

Creative problem solving goes a long way, but the district also benefits from the Bellevue Schools Foundation, filled with local stakeholders.

“One of the really great things we're really proud of is our amazing educators,” Obaid says. “They really go all out looking through different organizations and partnerships. They would reach out to the Pacific Science Center, ‘Hey, the budget is really tight. Would you be willing to host us?’ Our educators do a really good job in advocating and finding opportunities for community partnership.”

Another way of generating funding is spreading word about the innovative programs at the school. Ardmore got a big boost of publicity when Trevor Noah decided to join the school’s “Hour of Coding.” As Microsoft’s Chief Question Officer, the comedian and actor sat in on a fifth-grade class and discussed tech with Ardmore teachers.

“It was such a great connection,” Obaid says. “We have a whole ‘Wall of Wow’ at Ardmore where we post photos and news articles—every time our school gets recognized or we have a special visitor. It's a great inspiration for us to continue to reach for the stars.”

Tools They Use

• Sheldrick Wildlife Trust
• Microsoft Tools for Education 365
• i-Ready Assessment and Personalized Instruction (My Path) K-8 for English and Spanish dual language immersion, literacy, and math
• Code.org Hour of AI/Code

A longtime challenge of teaching STEM with robots is that when parts break or need to be replaced that often means purchasing more expensive components for an already expensive product.

Krzysztof Szyliński, a teacher at the Vocational Training Centre & School Complex No. 1 in Stargard, Poland, doesn’t worry about this happening with his students. That’s because the robots his students use come with a 3D printer with repairs in mind.

“Students can take measurements of damaged elements themselves, and then model them in CAD, and print them,” Szyliński says. “The measurements made force the student to perform mathematical calculations, the design develops spatial imagination, and the result is a printout of a finished element.”

Szyliński is one of several teachers I spoke with in Poland (via email with the help of a translator) who is using Astorino robots. Made by Kawasaki Robotics and development partner Astor, these recently debuted in the U.S. and lend themselves well to incorporating 3D printing into robotics education.

Szyliński and his colleagues recently shared tips for teaching robotics and 3D printing to support student success and job training in STEM.

Teaching With Robots: Letting Students Lead

Robotics, as with many STEM subjects, needs to be hands-on for the students. That’s why Paweł Derwich at the Electrical and Electronic School Complex in Toruń, Poland, advises not solving problems that come up for students.

“Help as much as it is needed but give them the opportunity to come up with different solutions on their own,” Derwich says. “The most important thing here [for student] is to create your own algorithms in programs and draw conclusions from any failures.” He adds that students should be reminded that making mistakes at this stage are to be expected and a key part of the learning process.

Sławomir Szymanowski agrees. “We must make sure that students do not passively accept technology and technical solutions,” says Szymanowski, a teacher at the Technical School Complex in Ostrów Wielkopolski, Poland. “We want them to be creators, to be able to create not only programs for a robot or a PLC, but also machine parts or elements of robotic production lines.”

Benefits of 3D Printing

Incorporating 3D printing into robotics education in particular, and STEM education in general, offers many lessons for students, say the educators interviewed for this story.

“Spatial modeling develops many skills and competencies,” Szymanowski says. “In addition to teamwork and developing creativity, 3D printing teaches a technical approach to many areas of life, including those related to robotics or broadly understood industrial automation.”

He adds, “When we develop even the simplest element for printing, we first have to imagine it. 3D modeling develops spatial skills and spatial visualization. When we reconstruct machine components, we have to take them apart, analyze, measure, or at least determine their size and proportions.”

Real-World Jobs Training And Beyond

Utilizing robotics lessons alongside lessons in 3D printing helps students develop skills that can lead to jobs. But it’s important for these lessons to be designed with the current and ever-evolving needs of the industry in mind.

“Teachers should be open to cooperation with companies where students will find employment in the future,” Szyliński says. “It is important to educate staff who not only have general knowledge of the educational material but also take into account the needs of the local labor market.” He adds this isn’t always easy. “The challenge for me, as a robotics teacher, is to meet expectations regarding the educational process and to properly prepare students for the requirements of the labor market – industry 4.0.”

For his part, Szymanowski says that one way to accomplish your objectives as a robotics instructor is to embrace the STEM concept of learning through discovery. "Such classes activate students very much, and give them a lot of joy when they are allowed to create and discover on their own," he says. "They do not passively participate in the teaching and learning process, but even create it and to some extent even direct it."

• Drone Soccer Looks Like Robot Quidditch. Here’s How Educators Are Using It
• Using AI and Robots To Build Social Connections For All Students

Inclusion is a big topic when it comes to education. Inclusion when referencing educators, however, might not be as strongly discussed as it should be.

A virtual classroom for teachers around the world to work together to create something more for their students was a difficult project to undertake, but in the right hands, it was not only made possible, but also made to flourish. Fortunately, Jacqueline Gardy was the right person for the task.

Gardy is Global Program Officer at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC, for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the Office of English Language Programs. She was recently honored by Tech & Learning during a recent Regional Leadership Summit with an Innovative Leader Award for Best Example of Virtual Learning.

Content for Comics in the Classroom

The concept for this collaborative pilot project involved gathering multiple teachers from around the world to help develop curriculum for use in the classroom. It just so happened that this curriculum was focused on using comics. Gardy explains how the idea started to come together.

“My supervisor gave me the greenlight to set up a pilot virtual exchange program with a limited budget,” she says. “I worked with five consultants, who helped me develop the curriculum and launch it. We used a combination of Google Docs, a Google YouTube channel, and Slack (free version). We made an Adobe Spark page as a homepage. So we did everything with a low budget in mind. We decided we wanted 40 teachers from all over the world to work with us synchronously online to develop content for comics in the classroom.”

Providing this new type of curriculum to teachers from all over the world helps to diversify their educational outlook and their teaching methods. Using comics as a tool for teaching is a novel approach to education, and the visual aspect also helps when connecting with teachers of varying backgrounds.

Since the pilot,16 other virtual exchanges have been developed with the administration aid under the English Access Scholarship cooperative agreement with FHI-360 and delivered by a variety of nonprofits and universities. The topics have been on Climate Action (with World Learning and Take Action Global), Global Perspectives in the Classroom (Azusa Pacific University), Global Citizenship in the English Language Classroom (UMASS Lowell), Business and Entrepreneurship in the English Language Classroom (Georgetown University), Differentiation for the Contemporary English Classroom (United Planet), Building Blocks for Service Learning (World Learning), Civil Communication with a focus on Computer-Mediated Instruction (Azusa Pacific University), Developing Digital Citizenship (Azusa Pacific University and iEARN-USA), New Literacies and 21st Century Skills in the English Language Classroom (iEARN-USA), Embedding Life and Career Skills in the English Language Classroom (World Learning), Future-Forward Teaching in the English Language Classroom (Take Action Global), and Power Skills in the English Language Classroom (UMASS Lowell).

How to Keep Teachers Engaged and Connected

Creating the program with everyday tools helped to keep the project within a recognizable scope, regardless of who was using the program, Gardy says. But a main obstacle was keeping teachers involved in the program given their locations and accessibility. Having the program come to fruition during the beginning of the pandemic was coincidental, but it also helped when teachers were switching to an online format en masse.

“Our launch date [for the program] was March 15, 2020, and that was right when the pandemic started, right as everything shut down,” Gardy says. “It just happened to be a blessing in disguise because suddenly teachers are no longer doing their full time teaching. They had a lot of time to learn tech skills and interact with people.”

Connecting at the beginning of the pandemic also led to teachers around the world realizing how similar their COVID experiences were, leading to a ready-built rapport that served as the foundation for expanding the program.

“It ended up being a conversation group once a week where we would all talk about our COVID experiences, while we were experiencing it all over the world,” Gardy says. “What was striking was how similar all of our experiences were even though you wouldn’t think any of us would have anything in common. That laid the groundwork for more virtual exchanges.”

This project led to a foundational understanding between teachers, no matter where they were located on the map. Their experiences during the pandemic and in teaching were similar if not exactly the same.

Putting It All Together

Operating an online program in a synchronous manner comes with its own challenges, such as catering to teachers living in different time zones and countries. But Gardy says that having teachers in different parts of the world makes for a more diverse grouping.

“There are usually 40 teachers per exchange, and then we divide them out by four facilitators,” she says. “So the pods were 10 teachers per facilitator. We usually set the pods up using timeline groups along the latitudinal lines to create participant diversity, with no more than three hours apart.”

Once the groups are made, a combination of synchronous and asynchronous interactions helps the teacher pods enhance their knowledge on particular topics.

“We introduce all the information at the beginning of the week, and then we have lots of different interactions that are either synchronous or asynchronous, either in discussion boards or in Zoom calls,” Gardy says. “Then we have these reflect and apply sections where they reflect on what they’ve learned and try to apply it in their classrooms immediately and/or to their final lesson plan. They have to attend 70% of the synchronous events. If they can’t attend the synchronous events, they can watch the recording and fill out an exit ticket to show they have participated.”

Gardy’s efforts demonstrate a method of global citizenship that helps educators reach out and collaborate with teachers across the globe. This endeavor makes education more accessible to teachers everywhere while empowering them to make education more accessible to their students as well.

• Innovative Leader Awards
• Regional Leadership Summit

Belouga is a study series platform that is designed for international class collaboration and pairing. All of it is focused on impactful education that can help sustainable action.

Started in 2017, the mission of Belouga was to offer accessible education internationally. This has been achieved through peer-to-peer and classroom connections, which are made easy using the platform.

While the platform initially offered a useful way to connect and teach using technology that was suited to hybrid learning, it is still relevant as a way to combine in-class cross-cultural learning.

The idea is to offer students a more global education so that they can understand the world on a far more intricate, subtle and personal level. This guide aims to clarify all you need to know about Belouga to see if it could work for your class.

What is Belouga?

Belouga is a website-based tool that offers a selection of learning resources aimed at cross-cultural exchange and global education.

The platform features a system it refers to as "CLAI," which stands for Curiosity, Learning, Action, and Impact. It does this by offering real-world learning that comes from global organizations, and is customized to help suit the needs of an age or class group.

This is very much community-based, and thanks to uptake in more than 100 countries, it is now more effective and wide-spread in its learning reach than ever.

How does Belouga work?

Belouga is easy to get started with and simply requires you to sign up as an educator, institution, or parent to begin using what's available. At setup it's possible to make selections such as grade level or content type so that you can tailor what you access for more specific outcomes.

It's also possible for students to tailor the results by answering a few questions that can help to personalize the content to their interests. You can then search using keywords, or specifically do a search based on the sustainable development goal you want to teach or learn about.

When it comes to that international connectivity, it's possible to pair students with buddies in other countries, or to pair classes across the globe. This allows for an exchange of learning that gives personalized lessons, relatively effortlessly.

What are the best Belouga features?

Belouga features lots of helpful videos that are paired with questions based on that content. This makes it a very useful tool for individual learning, freeing up time for teachers to help those who may need more attention.

This is also a useful distance learning system with features such as screen sharing, recording, and virtual hand-raising -- as well as live transcribing -- all making for an easy digital teaching setup.

Thanks to the organization of learning materials, which is broken into study projects, it is possible to set work to be completed outside of the class, and to be completed by students in groups with students in another country. This represents a great option for presentations across class groups.

Each project usefully gives a guide on how long that will typically take, making for a helpful figure that teachers can plan around.

How much does Belouga cost?

Belouga offers a free account with access to the basics for educators as well as a paid tier with more complex features available.

The Free version gets you unlimited students and limited lessons.

Go for the Premium plan at $14.99 per month and you get the above plus unlimited lessons and projects, video conferencing, national and local standards alignment, video chat recording, real-time transcription, personalized content playlists, professional development courses, and the ability to build your own Belouga Series.

Belouga best tips and tricks

Pair up presenting
Buddy up students with other students in different countries and have them work on a project together to present to their own and their buddy's classes.

Record and re-use
Use the video recording feature to capture your lesson teachings so students can re-visit that and you can use again for future classes.

Teacher team-up
Since this works with multiple teachers in collaboration it makes for a great chance to work across subjects, together, as well as across schools.

• New Teacher Starter Kit
• Best Tools for Teachers

Micro lessons seem like a simple educational concept: Targeted lessons for students based on their knowledge of the subject matter rather than grade or age. 

“It sounds very obvious, but it almost never happens in education,” says Noam Angrist executive director and co-founder of Young 1ove, a Botswana based organization that implements evidence-based health and education policies in Eastern and Southern Africa. 

Micro lessons, often called teaching at grade level or differentiated learning,  can help students who have fallen behind catch up rather than continue to fall further behind. 

“When children are behind, a lot of instruction tends to be over their head,” says Michelle Kaffenberger, a RISE Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, who has studied teaching at grade level. For example, a teacher is teaching division to children who haven't mastered basic addition yet, so they may not learn anything from that lesson. “But if you instead adapt the instruction to teach addition, and then move them up to subtraction, and then multiplication, and then division, then by the time you get there, they're going to learn a lot more,” she says. 

Kaffenberger recently modeled how these types of strategies could be used to overcome learning loss that occurred as a result of disruptions caused by COVID-19 in a paper published in the International Journal of Educational Development. 

Other research also supports the practice. 

Using this educational strategy in low-income countries was pioneered in the early 2000s by Pratham, an Indian nongovernmental organization, that formalized what became known as Teaching at The Right Level (TaRL) and it has proven successful in many instances. 

“It is probably one of the most well-studied education interventions and reforms in low- and middle-income countries,” Angrist says. “It has six randomized control trials showing it's one of the most cost effective ways to improve learning.” 

But the strategy can also work in high-income countries. 

“It's translating across contexts very well,” Angrist says. 

What Micro Lessons Look Like In Practice  

In the division example above, what the teacher or instructor would do is first administer a simple, kind of back-of-the-envelope assessment across a certain set of skills, Kaffenberger says. From that, they could determine which level each child is at and group them accordingly. 

This typically results in three or four groups. “The children who can't recognize numbers yet, they're going to be together and you're going to focus on recognizing numbers with them,” she says. “And for children who can recognize numbers, but can't do addition and subtraction, you're going to focus on those skills with them.” 

Many of these programs focus on reading and math, two subjects in which knowledge is cumulative. While there are edtech tools that give children exercises that are at their level, Kaffenberger says those programs tend to work best when they are employed by good facilitators and teachers. 

Angrist has been working to implement teaching at grade level strategies in Botswana where many students are not at grade level; for instance, only about 10 percent of fifth grade students can do two-digit division. “That is the bare minimum expectation at grade five,” Angrist says. “Yet you're teaching a grade-level curriculum, day after day, year after year. So of course, that's flying over everyone's head. It's a very inefficient system.” 

Schools that have implemented teaching at grade-level strategies have seen tremendous results. “We have not yet run a randomized control trial, but we collect data actually, every 15 days, to really see learning progress,” Angrist says. Before the teaching at grade level program was implemented, only 10 percent of students were at grade level with math. After these programs were implemented for a term, 80 percent were at grade level. “It’s extraordinary,” Angrist says. 

Implications for The Start of Next School Year  

In high-income countries, this style of teaching, with some variations, is often called differentiated instruction, Angrist says. “But it doesn't get as much attention any more. And I'm not entirely sure why.” 

Kaffenberger says educators across the globe should be aware of the potential of teaching at grade level. She worries that in the upcoming school year teachers will just assume students are fully prepared for their new grade level despite the pandemic learning losses. “I think that would be really devastating for a lot of children, because they missed out on material,” she says. 

Her advice: Teachers need to take seriously that many children will likely be behind. “Start the school year, armed with some basic assessments,” she says. “Then do some grouping by learning levels. And then focus on getting the children that are most behind caught up.” 

The research indicates that doing this could make a huge impact on student achievement. 

• 3 Education Trends to Watch for the Upcoming School Year
• High-Dosage Tutoring: Can Technology Help Curb Learning Loss?

Global Oneness Project

Dynamic multimedia resources explore life experiences around the world

Pros: There's a variety of media from photo essays to films to VR experiences. Everything is aligned to national standards, and cross-curricular content means all teachers can find something useful.

Cons: Not every story has a lesson to go with it, and some lessons require extra scaffolding or differentiation for different levels and abilities.

Bottom Line: Teachers looking to enrich their curriculum with high-quality, thought-provoking videos and photos will find plenty of inspiration, but may need to create or fine-tune some lessons.

[Puzzle Game Teaches Native American Culture]

Read more

App of the Day picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly. 

By Common Sense Education

By Common Sense Education

GatherIQ™ is a free app and website that teaches students about the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (Global Goals) for 2030 and inspires them to take action to make the world a better place. By exploring and interacting with GatherIQ, users will unlock donations to organizations supporting the Global Goals mission.

The latest donation campaign will focus on the goal of No Poverty and will benefit Zoe Empowers, a GatherIQ partner. Zoe Empowers equips orphans with tools and training to overcome life-threatening poverty.

A beta version of GatherIQ is being showcased this week at the International Society for Technology in Education Conference (ISTE 2019). To continue supporting organizations that are dedicating their efforts toward achieving the Global Goals, microdonations are available this summer for users to unlock donations for ZOE Empowers. A similar effort raised $5,000 for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas during SAS® Global Forum in April.

GatherIQ’s resources are easily integrated into classroom instruction through Curriculum Pathways® Crio™, a free digital lesson building platform. Educators can create and customize lessons for any class size or type.  

The curriculum experts from Curriculum Pathways have developed over 2,000 resources that align with education standards. Through Crio, teachers can draw from these resources, as well as content from GatherIQ, to jump-start classroom projects that are relevant to what is happening in the world today. In addition to opening new windows to our world, GatherIQ’s gamification challenges students to make an impact. 

As students explore the app, they will uncover microdonations that benefit nonprofits working on the Global Goals.  When thousands of students unlock the microdonations, their efforts turn into real change. 

Current nonprofit partners include Girls Who Code, the UN International Organization for Migration, DoSomething.org, WaterAid and Rise Against Hunger, among others.

SAS has just launched two partnerships with organizations devoted to fostering global education by exposing students to a variety of cultural experiences and preparing them for success in an increasingly connected world.

Launched by the UN, the World’s Largest Lesson produces free and creative resources for educators to teach lessons, run projects and stimulate action in support of the Global Goals. SAS will use digital-lesson builder Crio to transform many of the World’s Largest Lesson’s static lessons into interactive ones with assessments and feedback capabilities built in. SAS will also integrate content from the World’s Largest Lesson’s library of compelling and engaging content.

SAS and Participate Learning will co-create a new learning experience focused on teaching the Global Goals with Crio. Participate Learning seeks to integrate Global Goals into instruction to help students become more culturally aware, learn empathy and become more active citizens.

GatherIQ is on display at Booth 700 at the International Society for Technology in Education Conference (ISTE 2019), along with Crio, CodeSnaps and other Curriculum Pathways resources.

Attendees can also learn more at the poster session U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: A Global Scaffolding for Inquiry-Based Learning, taking place from 1 to 3 p.m. at Level 4, Terrace Ballroom Lobby, Table 46.

SAS will also show CodeSnaps at the conference. CodeSnaps is a no-cost app that teaches coding basics by enticing students to actively work together, hands-on, to control Sphero, an app-enabled robotic ball that students command using code and an iPad®. CodeSnaps can be used in any learning environment, including traditional and blended classrooms, 1-to-1 or at home. The collaborative coding activity requires only one Sphero robot and one tablet.

At the recent ISTE conference, I was excited to be part of the team to help spread the word about the new, Global Problem Solvers: The Series (GPS: The Series), a free educational initiative that introduces adolescents and preteens to real world problem solving through critical thinking, social entrepreneurship, collaboration, and the use of technology. Learners watch a series of cool videos starring a team of teen superheroes who inspire them to solve real world issues like lack of water and education. Each episode is accompanied by a teacher’s guide, storyboards, and scripts. To make sure the series reaches adolescents and teens worldwide, Cisco has made GPS: The Series available in English, Spanish, French and Hindi. Below is just one of the incredible resources, the Anatomy of a Global Problem Solver infographic, which could be used to spark a discussion with students about what it takes to tackle world issues.

+@Shellterrell, @iamvlewis, @mbfxc, and @fmargret at ISTE hanging with Huti the Owl at the GPS: The Series booth

Sign up for my new In-Service / Graduate Fully Accredited online courses this summer, Connected Educators: Harnessing the Power of Social Media for Professional Development, and Methodologies for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

[Tips for Encouraging Learners of All Ages to Read]

cross posted at teacherrebootcamp.com

Shelly Terrell is an education consultant, technology trainer, and author. Read more at teacherrebootcamp.com.

Nureva Inc.announces its first trans-Atlantic student collaboration project using its Span visual collaboration system and HDL300 audio conferencing system. The project kicked off in December and involves 4th-grade students from Pheasey Park Farm Primary School in Birmingham, UK, working with 12th-grade students from Riverview High School in New Brunswick, Canada, in six sessions over three months. The goal is to help students build communication and collaboration skills by exchanging ideas about how artificial intelligence and other technological innovations will impact their lives.

Each learning space is equipped with a 20' 2" (6.16 m) wide Span system and an HDL300 system that enables them to share and discuss their ideas. The 60 students from Pheasey Park and Riverview post their ideas and photos to a Span canvas in the cloud. Students see all the contributions instantly and interact with the information in real time. Together, they sort, combine and debate ideas as if they were working in the same room.