Connecting students around the globe
I have a vision where students connect with their peers from around the world. Why? Because it's interesting. It's challenging to create global friendships, across cultures and across seas. And it's interesting to learn what other are studying. Even the very precise studies, like math, are not exact all over the world. Sometimes you need help figuring out a problem and someone from across the world, who studied it in a different way, will offer that different angle that opens your eyes. This is very helpful especially when preparing for exams.
The idea of this network is that it is not one more site that offers content. There are many of those. The idea is to create a meeting place for students from all over the world, and they create their own content by discussing what is interesting or useful for them.
For instance, let's assume you excel at Math and don't do that well in History. You can offer help to your peers in Match. When you get a project in History - you "get lost". That's when you would like to ask for help from your peers. Can you imagine doing a history project about Napoleon and getting information about him from French students? It won't be the same as getting it from wikipedia I guess. My son studied on volcanoes in Geography and had to do a project on the city of Pompeii, in Italy. So he got material about it from Italian participants of the network. Something he won't get from his local teachers in Israel. Think of a project in bible (do you study bible) and getting material from students who actually live in Jerusalem, Bethlehem or Nazareth...
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So my question to you people is - would you join? Would you invite your kids or your students to join in? Even if this is a young network, at its early stages, not too many participants at this stage? Would you ask your friends to join too?
If you are curious come and visit: http://kids4kids.ning.com/
Early adopter have the big advantage as they can influence the direction this network forms, the content and features.
The idea of this network is that it is not one more site that offers content. There are many of those. The idea is to create a meeting place for students from all over the world, and they create their own content by discussing what is interesting or useful for them.
For instance, let's assume you excel at Math and don't do that well in History. You can offer help to your peers in Match. When you get a project in History - you "get lost". That's when you would like to ask for help from your peers. Can you imagine doing a history project about Napoleon and getting information about him from French students? It won't be the same as getting it from wikipedia I guess. My son studied on volcanoes in Geography and had to do a project on the city of Pompeii, in Italy. So he got material about it from Italian participants of the network. Something he won't get from his local teachers in Israel. Think of a project in bible (do you study bible) and getting material from students who actually live in Jerusalem, Bethlehem or Nazareth...
***
So my question to you people is - would you join? Would you invite your kids or your students to join in? Even if this is a young network, at its early stages, not too many participants at this stage? Would you ask your friends to join too?
If you are curious come and visit: http://kids4kids.ning.com/
Early adopter have the big advantage as they can influence the direction this network forms, the content and features.
Tags: connect, exams, friends, global, help, homework, international, network, projects, students
1 Comment
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About My Learning Space
Chad Outten
created this social network on Ning.
© 2008 Created by Chad Outten on Ning. Create your own social network
Hi Or-Tal Kiriati, this is indeed a very good idea. As it appears content and learning activities / processes are still disconnected. On the one side you find educational providers that start making their materials publicly available (see OER) and on the other hand you can find learning communities / networks (e.g. Jishka) that are driven by solving practical problems or to get homework done.
From your blog post it sounded like your kids4kids idea tries to bridge those two sides, at the kids4kids space however I am still getting a bit lost (which might be due to the fact that it is still a very young space).
If trying to make this bridge is indeed your objective than we might work on the same side
See also:
http://www.netgeners.net
http://wiki.netgeners.net/index.php?title=What_am_I_supposed_to_do_here%3F
http://wiki.netgeners.net/index.php?title=Rationale
Hope hearing from you!
Andreas
P.S. sorry for not managing to embed the links properly