 Everyone, today we are talking about going global, using CSOT Global Classrooms to connect you to the world. Thank you so much for being here today. We're gonna introduce ourselves as we get going in this session. I'm Angela from the CSOT team. Prior to joining CSOT, I was a kindergarten teacher for 15 years and using CSOT in my own classroom. You can find me on Twitter at Mrs. Gadkey. And Sophia is here with us as well. Introduce yourself, Sophia. Hello everybody, I'm Sophia Garcia-Smith, pre-K to second grade teacher for 19 years. This is my fourth year connecting globally with CSOT, so I'm really excited to share this with you. I'm a CSOT ambassador and you can connect with me on Twitter, SophiaGSTeach. All right, well Sophia and I are really excited to be together today because we both experienced this global classroom idea in our own classroom. So we're gonna kind of bounce back and forth in this session, just kind of sharing our experiences. But just know in the question box, feel free to jump in and ask questions as we go along. But we're hoping to reserve a solid 10 minutes at the end to dive in deeper if you have questions. So let's get started. All right, sounds good. So what we're gonna talk about today, we're gonna talk about why do we want to connect? We're gonna show you some samples from my classroom from last year when we connected. I'm gonna share my lesson plans with you, setting up your class and tips on how to find classrooms. And then like Angela said, we'll save the end for questions. The reason why we thought this was really important was because when I put out the notice on our Facebook page and on Twitter, I received over 60 people who responded to a global classroom. And once we get going, we'll kind of explain why that number is pretty outrageous when you're trying to organize a classroom. So let's get going and talk about why we connect. The benefits of connecting your classroom always are opening a window to the world for your students, giving them experiences that they may not have otherwise. I work in a school where it is title one and we have a lot of students who will probably not see much of the world outside of possibly their state, their town. And this is a really awesome way to show your kids how big the world is. We love to invite people, peers and experts into our classroom through the Seasaw Global classroom, which is great. Students and their works are celebrated beyond the four walls of your classroom. This is huge because what I've noticed since I've been doing this is that when the students know that this is going beyond just them, mom and dad and their teacher, their work improves. They want to make sure it is the best that they can be. And I've had great success with them, kind of thinking outside the box and doing great things. So what is a global classroom? So the way that I was introduced to this was that Angela did this when she was a kindergarten teacher and she did it with another classroom. I believe it was Ireland. And she kind of showed how this all worked. I kind of just took it from there, took some of her plans, tweaked them to work for me. And it's been a success ever since. So it did work. Yeah, and I'm just gonna interject for a second too, Sophia, because really for me, this came about because I was always struggling with how I want my students to really have this opportunity to connect with other students globally, but my students are five and six years old. And how do I do that in an appropriate way that they actually make some deep connections and not just view things from a distance that they have no real relationship with or connection to? So for me, this was a great way to eliminate some time barriers that might exist if you're using different technologies, but also make it really, really personal for the students in classrooms involved where there's a lot of interacting amongst everyone involved. So for me, that was a huge point of like, I can make this work. And I kind of know how to use SESA. We can make it work in SESA. So I was also really familiar with that. So if you are listening in and you're thinking, oh, you're a little bit terrified, maybe like I was, we're gonna get you going and you're going to be all set. So stick around. And what I wanna say is that Angela laid an awesome foundation, like without her organization and thinking through this and kind of tweaking it after her experience with it, it probably would be a little bit crazy and overwhelming, but I promise you, anybody can do this once we follow the steps and you'll kind of see as we go along. So we're using SESA to learn about other classrooms. What I've noticed over the four years that I've been connecting this way is that SESA is obviously booming. And it's so much simpler for me now to have classrooms that are connecting that have already been experiencing SESA. So it's really great that they're taking it to the next level, making videos, adding pictures. Now we have multi-page. I can't wait to see what this is gonna look like for this time. So we'll follow a plan for collaboration. That means it's a specific lesson plan where prompts will be given weekly and people will respond, other classrooms will respond for those prompts. I love teaching digital citizenship and appropriate commenting. This is a great way to practice it. It's a great, we'll show you a little strategy that we use so that we can make sure that we are realizing that the people on the other end are people. And it's not just putting words out there and not meaning anything. Also sharing learning outside of our classroom, which we already talked about, which is our huge, huge benefit. So this is the initial idea that was launched with Pamela. And Angela, and I'm gonna let you take it away. Yeah, so I just a shout out to Pamela Algee who's in Northern Ireland. We were literally, I think in a C-style chat and then hopped into a direct message and we're like, hey, we should try to connect our classes. So the very first time we did this global classroom, it was, I think we had four classes, maybe five classrooms total, where we set up a separate C-style class. Teachers were the students. So really you were adding, the students individually were not interacting. It was always usually within a whole, a large group where you would be checking into the global classroom. But here's just a couple examples of what kinds of things we did. One of the very first things we post is a tour of our classroom. And we share that to our global classroom. So this is a video that kind of goes through that. I won't play it right now, but imagine yourself walking around in your classroom, just talking about your classroom, keeping it really, really short because those attention spans will not go on forever. And then on the right here, this is something that my class did after we were viewing content that the other classes shared, specifically Ms. LG's class in Northern Ireland. So this was a way that we could compare and contrast how are we alike? How are we different? What are some of the things that we have in common? Which again, was really, really incredible to see and hear from my kindred earners and her kindred earners and preschoolers that were getting to really learn deeply about another class. And I know Sophia has some examples about her experience in her classroom as well. Yeah, so this was really great. This past spring, I did not do a classroom this fall. I usually do a session in the fall and then I do a session in the spring. What I love about the spring session is that Australia starts school like right around January, February, our time. And so you really have to be conscious of their school schedules and when you can kind of catch them at the right time to be able to join. So I love the spring session. Probably I make more connections in the spring than I do in the fall, but been successful both ways. So here's just a simple idea. This was talking about what we eat at lunch and what do our lunches look like. I believe this one is from Australia and you can see the comments all here. This is a teacher responding from Massachusetts, Kansas, and then Australia. But I wanna show you this quick video so that you can see how awesome this is for our kids to hear. At Golden Grove Primary School, most of the children bring their lunches from home. Although a couple of times a week, lots of children border from our school can team. When we bring our lunches from home, they come in lunchboxes that keep them nice and cool in our school bags. Well, sometimes they keep them warm. We love fruit sandwiches. And very yummy. We often have it on our toast for breakfast. So what was great about that video is that she talks about Benjamin, which is obviously huge in Australia and our kids had to figure out what was fruits and what was Vegemite. And so it was really great for the kids to hear these things. They loved the word canteen. It wasn't a lunch room, it was a canteen where they got to go get their lunches from. So great vocabulary, great questions. They start to think, they start to wonder their asking great questions. And as you can see when we comment, one of the students says, what is fruits? I love Nutella, it's my favorite. And then we put the student's name afterwards so that the other classrooms can see that the question was from a student. And sometimes when they're responding, they'll respond to that student specifically or they'll just respond depending on how it is. This was also one of the prompts which was the view outside your window. And I believe this is the school in Thailand. This is a view from the window. We can see the circle, the big tree and the nurses room. So what we loved about this school and the kids had so many questions about it is that they were a private school where they had a lot of students from all over the world that went to this school. So even though we were connecting with the school from Thailand, we were learning about they're speaking Germany, they're speaking Korean, they were speaking Spanish. They had lots of different languages and they were loving sharing every minute of it. So again, such great connections that we made. And now don't get me wrong, we're making just as great connections with classrooms that are in North Carolina or Florida or Arizona. Our kids, when you live in the state of Illinois, you only know what the Midwest is and that's seasons and all of this good stuff. So it's great to see how those things change within our own United States. So this is what- Sophia, I'm gonna interject for one second. I'm gonna say two things. Number one, I'm gonna give the first three digits of a code if you want a certificate if you're listening to this recording. The first three digits you will need are seven, six, two. Keep listening for three more digits at the end of the session. But one thing I noticed in yours, Sophia, is you, it looked like you typed a lot of, your class has typed a lot of comments and questions. That was very different than my class. When we did it, we almost always recorded with our voice the comments and questions. So I would have students actually come up and ask their question to the other students. If, obviously it works if everyone is speaking English. But that was really, really fun to get to actually hear their voices. That was truly incredible. And of course my kindergarteners, most of them at this time were not proficient at typing by any means. So that's just one thing to point out too, if you're thinking about that flow as well. But let's jump into this plan. Okay, so I love that Angela put at the bottom of this page. This is her original plan. So you can see how much, even when you compare the two of them, I didn't really tweak much. I changed a few things and made a timeline, all that good stuff, reminders. So this document, I believe is live, right? If I click on this, it should take me to the Google doc. Yes, and this is view only. So you are more than welcome to take it, make a copy of it and change it however you'd like. We try to do the connections for about four to six weeks depending on how the four weeks go. And if people are trying to catch up, again, you have to give a little bit of time for people if they have like, we have spring break coming up and in other countries, they may be celebrating a holiday or something where they may miss a week. It's really about a lot of organization and making sure that you let everybody know what is expected. I would be the teacher in the class and the rest of the classrooms that are joining would be the students in my class. I tell them ahead that we would like you to post once a week. We would like you to comment or try to comment once a week. If you can't commit to this schedule, we understand, but it really does make the connection so much better when everybody's on the same page and doing the same things. So here's the thing. Some teachers decide that they want a student to post and some teachers decide if they want to post themselves. The only thing is, is if you have more than three or four classes, you don't want five or six posts per classroom because then you're reviewing 20 posts a week and that's a lot for somebody to do. So it's really dependent on how you want to structure it. I try to keep the classrooms smaller, but I'll explain my craziness in a little bit when you see what we've done for this year. Each week, there is a prompt. So getting to know you. This is what Angela was talking about, getting to know your classroom, your daily schedule, walking around the room, taking them on a tour of what you start your day with, what do you do next? Where do you go? Show us your library, show us your lunchroom, maybe your office, your computer lab, the nurses office. All of those fun things. And again, you saw in one of the videos they used Adobe Spark. Remember how much stuff can be put into seesaw that you can make with clips as simple in your iPad or on your phone. So it doesn't have to be fancy. It's just whatever you want it to be. And as you can see that goes on, where do you live? What does this look like outside your classroom? What about holidays? Is your school close to your neighborhood? Do you walk? Do you take a bus? We get into holidays. What I love about the holidays week is that we usually collect data and we use this for our math unit where we talk about graphing and comparing classrooms and what's everybody's favorite holidays? And if there's holidays that we don't celebrate but others do. And again, my favorite, favorite part is always week four because this is where you read the same book across the globe. So every classroom is reading the exact same book that you are and you're reflecting on the story. What did the story teach us? And the books that we tried to pick, the sandwich swap and the one we're doing this year I think is Spaghetti on a Hot Dog Bun. They're all about diversity. They're all about different ways that people eat or live or however else. And it's really a great conversation about how different we are but at the same time how our differences don't make a difference at the same time. Here I'll put a list of participants, their name, maybe their Twitter handle, any other contact information that they want us to have. And then this is the sheet that's most important. This is connect to your global classroom. I will just cut and paste the QR code here. And then I ask that you don't share this with anyone and it's meant for private purposes for this project. So again, really simple. And if you follow it step by step by step it takes away some of that anxiety of not sure of how to do something. It will walk you through week by week, step by step. So here's my schedule. We post Monday through Wednesday. We try to comment and respond on Thursday and Friday. And depending on the time zone, we do have flexibility on what that looks like and what that may be. This is a video where we posted where we live. We show different parts of our city and our town. And as you can see, we have questions from other classrooms asking the same thing or sometimes they're just agreeing. We have something similar to this. This is what it's called in our room and that kind of thing. Again, loved these connections and the way that your students begin to see the world is just probably the most rewarding thing you can do and have for your kids. So here it is getting ready to create a class. The person who manages the class is the teacher. The other participants are the students. So don't forget to turn on commenting and editing. And I always have that I must approve all posts. Sometimes the teacher has left the code out and there's a student who maybe swipes the wrong code and is posting some of their just regular daily work. And I wanna make sure that I get a heads up before it goes out to whatever other students are out there. So really make sure that that's how it's going. As you can see, all the teachers are here. You can see where they're from. I put that right into their name. So Alabama, Virginia, Australia, the UK, and then here was my classroom right here. This was the sandwich swap, which I loved about CESA. You put the picture in there. The kids were able to draw, they were able to type and tell us what the lesson of the story is. So it can all be done within CESA. So getting started, here's the biggest question that I think I've had since I started this was how do I find people? And what I think is great is that CESA provides so many opportunities for us to connect outside of just our own classrooms. And that's with Facebook, that's with Twitter. There's the CESA blog connections document. Really use Twitter. If you don't, it's such a valuable tool for you to be able to connect with people who are doing exactly what you're doing. There's some hashtags there. Always tag at CESA, if you're looking for other classrooms. If you want to keep up with your age group that's specific, look at Facebook. There's a second grade one, there's a first grade one. There's so many specific groups on Facebook. So if you're a first grade teacher and you only want to connect with first grade classrooms that's a great place to start. Here's what I did was I sent this out on Facebook and I sent it out on Twitter and it was just a Google form. And it says, are you interested in joining? Where are you located? We're second grades. We're trying to keep it close to our grade level but we went first, second and third. What's the best way to contact you? Give me your name and contact information. And then I create a spreadsheet and kind of figure out how many classrooms I wanted to connect with and how many people filled it out. Here's the digital citizenship part that I wanted to quickly mention. What I find great about these kinds of connections is that this really lend to my tag is what I use in my classroom. There's a YouTube video on the left hand side from CESA Connect in Chicago and I presented on this. And we wanna make sure that when students are talking to other students, whether it's down the hallway in our classrooms or across the world, that we're using appropriate commenting. And so T, tell me something you like. A, ask a question or G, give a suggestion. You don't have to use all of them every time you comment. If you pick one or here or there, that's a great thing. There's also an activity link here for you that's in the CESA library that will help you practice this. We do practice this before we start the connections so that everybody understands that when you're asking a question or telling something you like or giving a suggestion, what would be the good sentence frame for that? So tips and tricks, here we go. So set up some rules. Can I miss a post? How many teachers ask that right from the beginning? Contact a teacher if it does not work for your schedule. Decide how many responses you want per class. That's what I was talking about. Do you want students to respond as individually or will you respond as a whole class? So I did say if every student responds, it will create a lot of posts for the class to review. So if we respond as one class, then it will eliminate some of those posts. Stick to the timeline. If it's going great, four weeks is great. Six weeks, if you want to make more connections from that. Again, I do a fall in a spring one with different classes, but also again, like I said, beware of school schedules outside of the U.S. They do not go to school the same times that we do. All right, we have time for questions, but I just wanted to mention, I know that some of the classrooms that I will be connecting with starting in March, this year I changed positions and I am seeing all first grade students, second grade students and third grade students, which gives me nine classrooms. So when I sent out the, hey, does anybody want to connect? I got 60 responses. It just happened to kind of fall in place that almost every grade level had about 20 classrooms. So in my insanity, I thought that I could do this with three different classrooms. So starting in March, I will be connecting with 21st grade classrooms, 22nd grade classrooms and almost 23rd grade classrooms all during the same weeks. Wow. Okay, so we have about seven minutes left. I just shared a doc that I literally created at Sophia with typing. So if you are here live tonight and you're like, I am doing this. Let's make it happen. Hop into this doc, put your name in there, grade level and contact info. Sophia and I are not doing anything with this information. This is just a way for, if you are here listening tonight and you're like, I'm scared to try to find people to connect with, hop into this doc, put your name in there. You're not committing yourself to anything. Nothing's been planned. It's just a way that you could put your name on there. You could say, hey, this is the first time I'm doing this, whatever you want. And if other people that are here live also want to jump in, this just might be a spot for you to connect and see how that goes. If you want to, if this makes it easier for you and you don't want to jump into the Facebook group, so think about that. I think the most important thing to note is your grade level. I should probably also say location and contact info. And if you don't want to share, if you don't want to share your personal email address, maybe just put your Twitter handle or whatnot, we've had versions of this type of doc on our website before. They're I think super outdated because I have not updated them. So think about that. If it's something that you want to hop into right now, we have people in there going for it. So I did it in kind of segments of five classes, meaning those would be the five that potentially work together. You can also move your name around if you're seeing like, oh, this is a first grade class and I'm fourth grade. I'd rather connect with more fourth grade classes, just an idea. So again, I'm not going to do anything with that doc. That's totally up to you to take it from here, but just thought I'd share that. I'm going to also look into questions. And before we do that, the last three digits of the code for the certificate are five, eight, four. Those of you watching live, just completely ignore that because you don't need to do anything with that right now. Hannah's questioning, is this document or how does these all blogs in or out? So we shared an idea that actually does not involve seesaw blogs at all. Both Sophia and I started with global collaboration just within our seesaw class. We created a separate class for the collaboration that allowed us to model what it's like to actually interact with other people, really focus on those appropriate comments. And then later in the year, for example, in my kindergarten class, then we shared some of our posts to the blog and then connected blogs so that students could actually be commenting individually on blogs, but they weren't always necessarily people that were in the same class, if that makes sense. Couple other questions have come in related to privacy concerns, release forms, like can my students actually do this? Do you take pictures of students and whatnot? So I shared the original doc that I created and also Sophia's plan as well in what I think is called announcements on your control panel for this session if you're live. A couple of things to note. Yes, you want to be aware of privacy, of course. And what I did is I shared with families that we were gonna do this. I was also very conscious of not to include student faces with their specific name. If they appeared in a video, it wasn't identifying them saying like, oh, John, I'm gonna tell you about X, Y, and Z. We also were very clear with all the teachers collaborating that we were not sharing content from the class outside of the class or on social media or anything like that. And actually families were not able to be this class either. So we talked a lot about what was happening in the class and sharing that kind of recapping up for families just in any way that you would share that, but they did not have access to the class. They would be connecting to their own students portfolio of that reason. Sophia, is there anything you want to add to that? No, exactly what you said. The first email that goes out to everyone who's connected is I understand there's lots of different privacy policies across the world. And this is what we've decided to do. If you do include faces, everybody agrees we will not retweet it or share it anywhere outside of the CSaw classroom. So it's our own little private classroom that nobody else would get a chance to see. We do what's nice about CSaw is that on announcements I can send parents the videos that we're making that we're sending out to the world and they seem to love that part of it. Yeah, and again, I think that's just part of modeling that digital citizenship, right? And you have this opportunity. And I think that again, look at the age of your students. Sophie and I both work with primary level students. So this for us was a logical way to start that. And I have to say just on a personal note, I felt like a five year old myself like, oh my gosh, I wonder if we heard from the class in India yet or like, did they, you can't, you know, like I came to school every day so stinking excited to see what people had shared in my students were too. And I think I could not have predicted the impact this would have on my students in my own classroom. They really grew to know these other classrooms and students that, you know, maybe had families in India or other parts of the, they were just, they would just light up and say, yes, we eat that. You know, we eat that food at my house or I have a, you know, my grandpa still lives there. So there were just these deeper conversations that you could have never predicted would have happened. And I definitely think if you're someone that's already using CSaw, this is so simple to start and try. I think just go for it and don't feel like you have to have, you know, every answer planned out and actually Sophia, Sophia and I have provided a pretty great outline that you could follow and tweak a little bit if you want to. Hannah's asking a question. Once you have connected with classrooms one year, do you have to redo the whole process each year or can you keep the group together for years as long as people agree to meet every fall or spring? I can answer first and then Sophia, you can hop in. I, I, it was just for that, you know, four to six weeks. I did not continue with the same classes. I think mostly because I didn't want people to feel over committed. Sophia, what do you, what do you do in that regard? Same thing. I try my best to not duplicate. I know there's a few teachers that I have invited back only because they work at amazing schools that I want to make sure that other people get a chance to connect with. But most of the time I try to get new connections so that our students and other people can, you know, share their, their story. So I think what my goal was here was when Angela and I were talking about this, everybody asks so many questions when I post this. And so I really wanted to let everybody know you can do this on your own. You don't need to wait to be on my wait list because I decided to take 60 classrooms this year. You know, just go ahead and try it. Like she said, it all falls into place. It seems like it's a lot, but it really isn't as you take it step by step. And like the documents that we gave you, it will walk you through every part that you need. Yeah. And I would just say too that, you know, one of the big recommendations I would say is for me having five classes total was about the perfect amount for the, how do I say this? The attention span of my students too because we wanted to see like what was new each day or what was coming in and we wanted to have time to focus on comments. And I think I don't, I don't know if I could have managed like 12 classes at the same time. I don't think we would have gotten as deep with each of the classrooms. So even think about, you know, maybe you want to try this with two other classes. If you get a group of three, go for it. Just give something a try, test it out, see how it feels to you. And then, you know, each year you can try something new. The other thing I would note too is Sophia had talked about, you know, sharing holidays and talking about that. Use this as an opportunity to really think about, you know, the standards or curriculum that you're responsible for and how can you inner, you know, put it all together and make it work in this experience as well. So think through some of those things too. Cause this could be- Sorry, Angela, that was a great point. I forgot to mention that. Thanks for bringing that up. A lot of teachers said, you know, this is just too much work on top of everything that I'm doing instead of looking at it as some way to include your social studies. We talk about currency that could be part of your math. You know, we talk about weather that part of our science. So make sure that you take those opportunities and interject it into your curriculum. It's definitely worth it. All right. Other questions coming in. Connie Thames, you add the teacher names in a student list before they connect or they just join. So I added, I created a new class. I added this teachers as students and I shared the class code with the teachers to sign. So I had added them myself. Sophia, what did you do? Yes, absolutely the same way. I changed it to one-on-one sign in. I send them the code. Their name is already in. And as you see, it said their name dash and where they were from so that when the others log in, they can automatically see where all the rest of the classrooms are coming from. Yup. All right. So questions are totally cleared out. So we're over a few minutes here already.