Global Learning

One of my goals this year is to introduce more global learning opportunities. I feel like I am beginning to embrace this concept personally with my PLN through Twitter and Facebook, but I need to also help my students discover how they can be global learners. When I stumbled upon the website for a Global Collaboration Day, it seemed like the perfect way to introduce the concept. I set up a project through Flipgrid, asking music teachers to share videos of their students performing a song. My hope was that we could truly get schools all over the globe to participate. While that didn’t happen, there were 35 videos submitted! Four were from my school 🙂 But there were also videos from across the US, Mexico, and Brazil. I consider it a success! According to Flipgrid there were over 1,800 video views and 39 hours of engagement. I was hoping there would be more interaction between the various schools, so I may try to add some comments myself and see if that encourages conversation.

The best part of this for me was seeing how my students reacted. When they first realized it was possible that people all over the world could hear them play, something definitely changed – they sat a little taller that rep 🙂  This week we went back to the Flipgrid to watch our video. The students loved seeing that 40 other groups had watched them! They were very quick to recognize the number of “likes” they had received as well. We could have spent all class period watching videos, but I left it at 3 for the day. More next week for sure. Another “teacher-win”occurred later in the day when I was talking to a student and her mother after the school. The student couldn’t wait to tell her mom about the videos, because she thought it was such a neat experience.

This was my first time really using Flipgrid as a teacher (aside from an experiment for a family reunion which was a hit!) It was easy to set up, but I still haven’t decided if the videos should have required moderation. Some videos had less teacher-involvement then others and got a bit silly, but for the purpose of the project – getting students to share their music – it still worked.

I’m excited to say, while this may have been my first project on a global level, it definitely will not be my last! I have a couple other projects in mind for the year where we will reach out to professional musicians for various topics that I’m hoping will be equally as successful. Stay tuned!

~Theresa