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=Thanks for attending the first George Lucas Education Foundation Webinar "Small World: How to Bring Your Students Into the Global Classroom." =

Unlike books, radio, and other media, the Internet is a two-way communication tool. Online, everyday people are able to shape and contribute to the collective experience – it empowers you and your students to become information producers, rather than mere consumers. We know that the Web is changing politics, business, and the media – but what does that mean for teachers and schools? We're looking forward to the conversation! Please feel free to use the discussion tab above to leave your comments or questions.

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Please get in touch!

Will Richardson [|GLEF National Advisory Council Member] weblogged@gmail.com [|Weblogg-ed.com] (blog) [|Powerful Learning Practice] Book: [|Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms]

The Web is Changing the World
It's changing the way we communicate, the way we connect with one another, the way we do business, and most importantly, the way we learn. And our relationship with the Web is changing as well.

//It's a Read/Write World//
Whereas we've spent most of our time with Web taking information from it, we're in the midst of an explosion of easy to use tools that let us write and publish to the web in any number of ways. Over 200,000 [|YouTube] videos, [|one million blog posts], over a million [|Flickr] photos are published every day. The significance of this, however, is not so much that we can publish as much as it is that we can find each other based on what we publish and subsequently interact around our passions. In the words of author Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, this newly global group-forming ability represents a "Tectonic Shift" in the way we interact.

These Shifts are Changing Us
There is no question that these opportunities and potentials are changing many of the traditional structures in our lives. For instance, the Read/Write Web changes:
 * **//Politics//**: If we know how to form groups around the things we are passionate about, [|we can change politics as usual].
 * **//Media//**: What happens when [|every computer is a printing press]?
 * **//Business//**: Markets are no longer about products as much as they [|are conversations]

These Shifts are Changing Learning
In a world where we can connect with other potential teachers and mentors who share our passions for learning, we need to begin thinking differently about our expectations for our students. How about this as a graduation requirement for the 21st Century?


 * //"Students will be able to create, navigate and grow their own personal learning networks in safe, effective and ethical ways."//**

What Does the Global Classroom Look Like?
The Read/Write Web is more than simply publishing; it's about the connections we make as individuals and as groups **//after we publish//**. Here are some examples of ways in which we can leverage those connections:
 * Learning takes place in connections when we share our work. Take a look at [|11-year old Laura Stockman's efforts]as she shares her efforts to change her community.
 * We can use our connections to bring students together to give voice to their desire to change the world as in the [|Many Voices for Darfur] project.
 * We can also use these tools to collaborate with our physical space, local networks. [|Jason Welker's wiki for his Economics class] is a great example of building something meaningful together.
 * Or, we connect classrooms together across geographies, as in this [|"Thinwalls"] example from Clarence Fisher in Snow Lake, Manitoba and Barbara Barreda in Los Angeles. These are kids teaching each other.

[[image:http://img.skitch.com/20081106-scyae9ncut8rhtkcp5du5dg8x.jpg width="365" height="156" align="right"]]So Where Do We Start?
To fully understand the implications of social networking tools and learning, we need to look at our own learning practice. What ways can you begin to add dots to your map in terms of the connections that you can make around your passions? How can you begin to model for your students the ways in which the Read/Write Web provide opportunities for building lifelong learning relationships across time zones and cultures?