Turning your eProject into a Collaborative one!

Hello everyone,

Did you enjoy creating your Open Educational Project? I hope you learned a lot from my last post! 

Today, we are going to see how to collaborate with the world by sharing our project with other people. I am pretty sure you all enjoy to surf the net in search of motivating and inspiring projects that will help you deliver knowledge to your students, with enthusiasm, and in a meaningful way! Well, after this post you will be able to share your awesome and creative project with the world! This way many teachers will be able to make a good use of your project and ideas within different classes around the world! 

Isn't this exciting?
Moreover, we will also learn how to transform our project into a collaborative one. This means that we will have to make some changes in the prototype we have prepared, by creating meaningful activities through which children will be able to cooperate not only within the classroom but also out of the classroom! They will be able to connect with other children and cooperate with other classes, connecting with the real world. In other words, we will learn how to make our project a service-learning project, in which children will learn how to investigate and how to behave in the real society.

Now, in order to transform my project into a cooperative one, I think it is important to design or adapt my missions, in order for my class to be able to do the following things:

First: 
Encourage children to collaborate and cooperate within the classroom. For this, children will have to overcome one mission together: investigate and learn about how to raise a plant. They will need to work together and find out what are the elements that help a plant grow, as well as what they need to do in order to take care and raise it!  This is what we call cooperative learning. 

Second: 

After having done the research within the classroom, children will be encouraged to collaborate and work outside the classroom. This means that they will have to get dirty while learning how to actually plant and raise a real flower or any type of plant! They would have to decide in the first stage what plant they want to plant and how to raise it. Within this stage, they would have to collaborate with each other and learn how to raise a plant, but not only that! They will learn how to take care of the living things around them and the importance of not throwing trash in nature nor anywhere but being careful around such small and fragile living things.

This part of the collaborative project will be carried out through time, and children will create a diary in which they will write a report of what they did and what happened with the plant, if it bloomed or not, how they take care of it and so on. They can also take picture of important stages in the plant's life and share it in their diaries. 

But not only that! Children will cooperate with other classroom and decide on what they should do to keep the environment clean. If the plants are going to be planted in the school ground, they would go and explain the importance of keeping it clean to other classes. 

The teacher will make sure to share their progress with the social media, through the classroom blog and also by Twitter.

Third: 

For the project to become a real collaborative one, children need to bring what they have learned back to the classroom. They can share what they did during the week to take care of their plants and nature when outside the classroom. Talking about what they learned and what they would do better in order to take care of the living things around them, can be a good way of collaborating, as children will learn from the experiences of other children and together they can be more aware of the importance of taking care of what surrounds them. Bringing pictures to class, as well as drawings can be a good way of sharing information of their personal experiences. 

In order to raise awareness in the world about the importance of loving and taking care of the living things around us, children can create a big poster in which they can share what they did and learned during the project and share it with other classes and of course with other schools and communities. The teacher will be the one to share the results of the project via Blogger, Twitter, or any other social media available. 

It is amazing what children can learn through a collaborative project! They will be able to experience first hand what learning means as they will learn how to solve problems and how to work in groups and individually. Moreover, they will learn to respect other classmates besides respecting nature and the environment surrounding them; they will feel challenged by the different missions and every member will be able to actively participate in the project. Children will have to opportunity to teach what they learned, as they will share their experiences and what they learned with other students. Furthermore, we cannot forget the skills they will acquire in order to resolve conflicts that may arise, to communicate their past experience and knowledge, debate and research, besides many other HOTS and LOTS ones. 

Having said all this, I have to mention the importance of being clear in your collaborative project. With this, I mean that the goals and steps children have to follow, have to be clear. This way they will not feel burdened by the difficulty of the missions, as they will be able to understand and identify the small steps that will guide them towards the final goal, which is sharing their experience with the world and raising awareness on the importance of cherishing the Earth. 

The collaboration is not only limited to our students. As teachers, we have to collaborate with each other! For that to happen, we can share our educational projects and collaborative projects, so we can all use them and improve them if necessary. Besides, by sharing our projects we can collaborate with different classes, schools, and communities that are carrying out the same project as us. This way children can compare results and experiences with other children, making the learning more meaningful. 

We can share our projects by presenting them to the public! Following, I will share with you a flyer that I created to present my collaborative educational project!

If I shared too much information or I left something unclear about the steps that would turn your Open Educational Project into a Collaborative one, please take a look at this diagram that I created! I hope it will clear your doubts!

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The process of analysis

• Before starting to write the article, I had to do some research. For this, what helped me a lot was reading some of the information that was shared with us about how to create a collaborative project, through our university campus by our ICT teacher. 
• After the research, I created a diagram, with Easel.ly in order to get my ideas straight and transform the plain prototype into a collaborative project. Before choosing this amazing application, I tried a few more that you might like in order to create your own diagram: Canva and Mindmeister. 
• After writing the article, I had to present my project through a visual metaphor. For this, I used an application called  Smore. However, I tried other applications besides this one. I created a comic using PIXTON, an application that you can easily use to create a funny presentation of your collaborative project. I did create a comic with it and I had lots of fun! I will make sure to use it again. You can see the comic I created about the "Lifecycle of a Plant" by clicking here. 

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Self-reflection

There are no words to explain how important this challenge was for me. First of all, we all need to be aware of the importance of collaboration in the teaching-learning process, as this will give our children the opportunity to have  more meaningful experiences that they can share with the others. Besides, creating a collaborative project or transforming your plain eProject into a collaborative one will have more benefits for our students than we can ever imagine! Children will be able to learn by doing things that are out of their original rutinary school life and they will feel encouraged to learn by doing and not only by listening and watching how things should be done.
Imagination and creativity will be at their top, as children will have to make use of such skills in order to share their knowledge and ideas with the others. Furthermore, not only children will benefit from the experience! Teachers from other schools or communities can share their ideas in order to create challenges and missions that will make the experience of the project even more powerful! As teachers, we have to use our imagination and creativity in order to design the perfect mission for our students! I have learned that it is not an easy job. However, the aftermath of the experience is an amazing satisfaction!
While designing the missions and imagining how they would turn out in the real classroom and with real students I felt excited! I can't wait to collaborate with other teachers and learn how to take this project into the real world! There are many things that need to be changed and so many others that I need to learn for my improvement as a teacher, but it is something I wait with enthusiasm and optimism!
Now, going back to the writing of this post, this time it was more difficult writing the post because I had to try so many applications and make research on how to change my eProject into a collaborative one. Moreover, I spent plenty of time working on the flyer and the diagram I shared above. Nevertheless, I learned so much! I know how to use two more applications pretty well: Easel.ly and  Smore. I really enjoyed using them and I hope you will too!

Hope you enjoyed this post, and as always I will wait for your feedback and collaboration for the improvement of this project!

I can't wait to see your collaborative project too!

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