Collaborative tools for a global future

Connecting students and teachers around the corner and around the world

The Connected Learning Community (cLc) is a comprehensive platform that provides an exceptional way to promote communication, organization, collaboration, creativity, and enhance learning opportunities in your school. It is also a great way to deliver our online professional development modules. It provides teachers and students with tools to create thriving learning communities within your school as well as to participate in global learning communities outside your school. Over one million users now agree it is the first choice for a teaching/learning platform.

Far beyond the benefits of professional development and the creation of professional learning communities, teachers and administrators have the opportunity to form groups and collaborate on projects with other teachers locally and globally.

It also gives students and teachers the tools they need to create safe personalized spaces and areas that can be connected with other teachers and students in a way that would facilitate communication, collaboration, organization, creativity and learning. For students, project-based collaboration enhances opportunities for higher level thinking skills needed for analysis and synthesis as well as the depth of knowledge needed for authentic learning.

Thomas Friedman states that our mandate as educators is changing. We agree. While our efforts continue in teaching the academic basics, we are now preparing students to embrace the technologically flat world and their global citizenship. In the process, cLc will help them:

1. “Be[come] good collaborators and [problem solvers] …to learn how to learn and nurture right brain skills...”(Freidman, p.315) With the changing world, “different societies and cultures are in much greater direct contact with one another.” Students must become more adept in global citizenship.
2. Solve the larger problems of today and tomorrow through “collaborat[ing] horizontally” (p.479) with others locally and internationally. We believe the Connected Learning Community offers the best platform for the overall collaboration of students and teachers and we are pleased to be authorized resellers in the U.S.
3. Go beyond rote memory and perform in accessing higher level thinking skills, a need recognized by the Department of Education as evidenced by their adoption of Norman Webb’s, Depth of Knowledge Model.

Students in the UK, Hong Kong, Australia and other places are learning how to collaborate locally and globally with this platform, and we feel socioeconomic and cultural barriers are minimized through technology that allows this kind of collaboration.  One student is equal to another in this new global playing field, and, as Friedman points out, it is becoming increasingly “level” as more participate.

As educators, we know that more of the same is not a recipe for change. We also agree with Friedman…. “We must embed tools and the concepts of collaboration into the education process that runs through the whole curriculum to effectively prepare our students to think with some depth and collaborate with others in producing solutions for our local and global problems” (p.315). Students must be passionately and productively engaged with each other and the world at large. For a web conference to demonstrate this tool, please contact us at cLcdemo@educationresources-llc.com

Friedman, Thomas L. (2006). The world is flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century. Farrar,Straus and Giroux, New York. pp.315-479.