Global Education Conference: Connect this week!

Want to learn more about how to engage your school community in global literacy?  Want to connect with and learn from inspiring educators and students across the globe?
This is your week, friends!
The fifth annual Global Education Conference is a free, week-long online event bringing together educators and innovators from around the world.
Held Monday, November 17 through Friday, November 21, 2014, the entire conference is virtual and will take place online in webinar format. Sessions are held around the clock to accommodate participant time zones.
The Global Education Conference is a collaborative, inclusive, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to significantly increase opportunities for connecting classrooms [and libraries!] while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity and educational access for all.
On Monday, at 11:00 PM Eastern, I will be co-presenting Going Global: A Literacy, a Process, a Library Call to Action, with Shannon Miller, Craig Seasholes, and author, Paul Fleischman.

Here are the deets:

Never before have we had truly effective tools for synchronous conferencing and media-rich asynchronous group discussion. Never before have we been able to leverage our emerging online communities of practice.   Never before has participation been so possible.  Never before has our world been so flat. Never before has it be more obvious that the prefix geo might amplify themes in any curriculum.

As librarians, we haven’t yet leveraged our true power as global connectors.  Lately we’ve been thinking about significant yet-to-be-realized opportunities and how we might realize them.

Our children deserve teachers and librarians who are global. TLs who can plan meaningful global learning partnerships, connecting learners, classrooms and libraries through inquiry projects and expanding the possibilities of expanding the books we read.

It’s a convergence.

This process might happen as a three-level taxonomy:

• Introduction: We learn to use the tools for connection and share their affordances with learners, through engaging, though often one-shot, activities, like Mystery Skypes.

• Inquiry: Guided by teachers and librarians, students engage in authentic partnerships to address issues and problems, engaged in authentic, relevant curricular projects like Flat Classroom.

• Independence: Students transfer use of the tools and strategies we’ve modeled, using hashtags to identify global experts, setting  up their own investigatory conversations and events. They become citizen journalists, scientists, collaborative writers and creators, engaging in such projects as our proposed Eyes Wide Open initiative, inspired by award-winning author Paul Fleischman.

Session links:

• Eyes Wide Open
• Eyes Wide Open Community
• GlobalTL Community
• Eyes Wide Open: A Proof of Concept for Sustaining the Conversation Around Books
• Going Global: A Literacy, a Process, a Call to Action

Conference links:

• Conference Schedule
• General Session Descriptions
• Keynote Speakers
• Training
• Blackboard Collaborate Help
• Getting Started (English)
• Getting Started (español)

Filed under: #globaltl, activism, conferences, Connected Educators, connected learning, global, globaled14, information literacy, webinars