 There are exceptions to this, but for the most part classrooms today function in much the same way as they have for the last 100 years. The teacher is the person with the knowledge. The teacher stands at the front and gives out that knowledge. The teacher knows how to parse the sentence or how to factor an equation or how to spell the word or as in my classroom the teacher is the one who knows how to read. The teacher shares this knowledge with the students and then the students also know and these classrooms all of the learning is one way. It starts with the teacher and flows to the students. There are other ways to learn. There are other people who can contribute to the learning of the students in your classroom, enriching their lives and expanding their learning. I would like you to consider the possibilities of connecting your classroom with other classrooms with experts in what your students want to know or with individuals who can help your students to learn. Technology tools now exist that allow you to do this. These tools not only let your students read and watch what others are doing in a one-way kind of communication, but they actually let your students share in the learning and in the direction that learning takes. Your students can also be the experts or the teachers or the questioners. By connecting your classroom with other people beyond the walls of your classroom, you can extend and deepen the learning of your students in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Connecting your classroom deepens the learning. I teach first grade in Moostra, Saskatchewan, Canada. To say that our winters are cold is a bit of an understatement. For those of you who don't teach in a primary classroom near the poles, let me give you a heads up on this. The advent of colder weather and winter means a lengthy and very trying, getting dressed for outside routine. Not just at the end of the school day, but at lunchtime and at morning recess and afternoon recess as well. As teachers, we try to encourage the children to speed them up. We help with zippers, we tie scarves, and we help to look for lost mittens. We want the children to get more time outside and we want to use less class times pulling on ski mats, pants, jackets, scarves, mitts, and boots. So we cheer them on and encourage independence. By January of last winter, my students decided that they could do this really quickly. They wanted me to make a video of them putting on their outdoor clothes so that we could post it on our classroom blog and show how fast they now were. This is what happened. My class wondered how fast they could get their snow clothes on. Ready? Go. It's 20 seconds. It's been now 50. That's one minute, one minute and 15 seconds. Wow, awesomeness. Because my students thought they had done so well and had been so fast, we also put this question at the end. The very next day, someone saw that video and took up that challenge. Bill in Kansas, who happened to see what we had done, sent a video response of himself putting on his snow clothes. My students marveled that some of them had the same clock on their wall at home as he did, but wondered why his winter clothes were different than theirs. Is that what his house looks like? Why does he have ski pants like that? We received other group responses as well. Several classrooms took up our challenge and posted videos online. We watched fascinated as other classrooms demonstrated their best fast dressing techniques, sometimes with the children encouraging each other on in another language. Those videos led to more questions. Why was that classroom faster? Where is Switzerland? Why do those kids talk like that? How come they have a bigger locker than us? We compared our classrooms in outdoor gear. The responses to that simple point and shoot video I had made and the subsequent classroom discussions we had covered several social studies outcomes and serendipitous they taught my students things they could never have learned any other way. We have used connections of some kind, whether through our classroom blog, through our classroom Twitter account, through Skype or some other kind of connection to help us meet our curriculum outcomes in all of our subject areas. When we learn through these connections, the students learning is always extended in ways we had never anticipated. And the students are learning how to appropriately participate in the online world at the same time. We can practice phonics skills in our classroom or we can practice them with other students from far away who are also learning about the silent D. We can learn to read with text that's prescribed and chosen by the teacher or we can read tweets or comments that are personalized text written right to my students or one of their classmates. I can use my somewhat limited knowledge to explain to my students how their hearts or their brains work or they can use Skype or a Google Hangout to ask questions of a health expert. We can practice math problems on worksheets or we can share math problems with other classes using Twitter or Skype. We can practice reading fluency with the other students in our classroom or we can do readers theater with children in another province or another country. We can write in notebooks or we can write on blogs and have an authentic worldwide audience through our classroom or individual student blogs. I'm not the only teacher whose students are connecting to others and using these connections to deepen their learning in the classroom. Students who use to learn geography concepts in more traditional ways are now learning from people who actually live in those places around the world. This map from Robin Teesson's class shows the places her class visited last year using mystery Skype. The things her student learned took them beyond what the curriculum prescribed for that age group. They were learning from and with others from far away. Third graders practicing mental math in Atlanta can practice it in their classrooms or they can make up their own mental math problems and challenge other classes via Twitter to solve the same problem and then share their thinking. The student's motivation is much higher when they're connecting with other classes learning the same skills. Jody Dinahammer's juniors and seniors in Texas could have just studied how to have healthier bodies and minds but instead they actually created an online course to teach younger students about those concepts. They invited the younger classes to leave comments on the project blog and responded to every comment. The learning of those juniors and seniors was deeper when they had a purpose and a real audience for their work. They saw what they were doing as having real meaning. First graders need to practice writing. They need to practice a lot. Karen Lyonman's students could practice in their notebooks, which only they and their teacher and possibly their parents would see or they could tweet or post a bog post that potentially the whole world might see and the world might answer. Stories like this are repeated every day around the world as classes reach out to the world beyond the walls of their classroom. If you're an educator, you can also be part of this. You can begin to invite others into your classroom using whatever tools you have at your disposal. It's not about having access to a lot of technology. It's about what you do with that technology. Amanda Marinen, who was at that time teaching a prep class or what I would call kindergarten in Brisbane, Australia, had no technology in her classroom to connect with the world outside. So she used her own smartphone to connect her class with others. They used Twitter and shared words, pictures of the students' work and voice recordings of the students talking about their learning. She used what she had. If you have already connected your students with the world beyond your walls, invite someone new to connect with your class. Support the teacher next door who is hesitant to start. If you're watching this on the K-12 online conference site, leave a comment below about how you would recommend teachers begin connecting. If you were just starting, how would you find your first connections? If you are watching this embedded somewhere else, you can leave a suggestion at the link that's on the bottom of the screen now. The first step is usually the hardest one. So take the time to give options for someone who would like to connect, but isn't sure how to begin. If you're an administrator, encourage your teachers as they begin to grow the learning in their classroom to include others from beyond your school. Give them whatever support they need. If you have never connected your class with the outside world, give it a try. One of the best ways to start is to connect with others who are interested in or teaching something similar to you. How do you find those people? Well, the video presentations in this strand of the K-12 online conference are a great place to start. Also, many people believe so strongly in the power of connecting that they have taken the time to create projects or other ways for classrooms to connect. They've taken the, where do I find someone to connect with, question, away by providing a place for you to connect with others and who are like-minded educators and with their classes. I've asked people who have been doing this for a while to share their ideas. You'll find some of those options below if you're viewing this on the K-12 online conference website or if you go to the link at the bottom of the screen. Opening your classroom to share it with others opens kids' eyes to new people and new ways of thinking. The world is indeed large, but the technology that's now available makes it smaller and your students have a chance to be part of the learning themselves instead of just being taught. So why not give connecting your classroom a try? It will motivate your students, deepen their learning and give them an authentic audience. Isn't that what we want for our students? That's certainly what I want for mine. I want them to be engaged and I want them to learn how to learn from and with others. I want them to know that what they think and create has value beyond our classroom. Why do classrooms connect with others from around the world? I'll leave the final answer to that to some experts that I happen to know.