Collaboration in the PYP

[Leigh Newton]

In March this year I attended a PYP workshop in Lisbon on the title of this post. I've also just invited all the participants whose email addresses I have. I'm hoping that some will join and continue the journey further.

I'm not sure how to take the next step and get some global collaborators but I do know that online collaboration is a highly motivating experience and supports the internationalist philosophy behing the PYP.

Given that the PYP revolves around units of inquiry, what are your ideas for collaborating with students from other global schools that are working with different units of inquiry?

* We could share our ideas around our writing in Language Arts, giving editorial feedback, writing collaboratively in various genres.
* We could build a wiki together that compares our (host) nations in relation to each other's units of inquiries. Mmm. How might we justify that under the PYP? There's lots of possibilities of using Elluminate, Skype, email, wikis, GoogleDocs, blogs.

Along the way we have to consider safety protocols as well. What restrictions do we place on the level of public access, given that we're dealing with primary children and school admin that are rightly concerned about protecting children?

What fits within our units of inquiry? What ideas do you have?

Most importantly lets have a conversation to examine possibilities.

[Leigh Newton]

Looks like Ning is not an option for primary school collaboration. Ning says they won't give ad-free sites to us the kids are younger than 13.y.o.

"According to Ning's Terms of Service, we offer Ning to those over 13 years of age. This isn't an arbitrary. It's so that we can comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (www.coppa.org) in preventing the collection of personal information from children under 13. Because of this, we are unfortunately unable to support your network. Please refer to our Terms of Service for further information: http://www.ning.com/about/tos.html."

What other options do you know about. I understand that Moodle provides a social-networking facility. Is that the case?

[Julie Lindsay]

Hmmmm..yes this is coming from the USA and the coppa law rules. Despite understanding (I think) the need for this restriction part of me always wants to bend the rules.
Have you tried TakingItGlobal.Org ?? You can set up your own classes within this and then find others to collaborate with as well. There must be somethign out there like Ning for under 13s! Will try and find out.