Map Mates Teams up with Classroom Bridges!
I’m really excited to share that Map Mates is teaming up with Katie Ritter’s Classroom Bridges (She’s a Google Certified Innovator based in Cincinnati — small world! I love how I keep finding more and more innovative educators right here in the state of Ohio!)
According to Katie, “the main purpose of Classroom Bridges is to help you find other teachers who are willing to collaborate with you and your students. These connections could be something as small as doing a Google Hangout to expand your students’ audience for class presentations, or they could be much larger scale projects where your students are working together (in two different locations) to complete an end of unit project. No matter the complexity of your connection, it’s important to get our students connected to each other.”
I couldn’t agree more! Our kids need to develop global competency and cultural sensitivity now more than ever, plus the technology available to many students these days enables that goal. So why not start providing the platforms that allow teachers to easily connect?
As you already know, I’ll be on my traveling sabbatical during the 2016–2017 school year with the goals to:
- visit primary and secondary schools to observe best practices in a variety of education systems around the world and
- while visiting those schools, find teachers who are interested in forming meaningful global connections with teachers here in the USA with the goal of cultivating greater cultural sensitivity and global awareness/competency in our students.
While I really believe that the experience connection of visiting schools in person to connect teachers abroad with educators I am also familiar with as personal colleagues at home may help to get meaningful connections started, I think that Katie’s digital platform is a wonderful way to connect for teachers who may not have access to this kind of in-person match-making. It may also be useful for my own teachers to connect again in the future after an initial match via Map Mates. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that you cannot have too many resources when it comes to trying to make your classroom more global.
That’s why I was so excited when I found Katie on twitter and reached out to see if there was some way we could join forces to enable teachers to make meaningful global connections more easily. I knew we could help each other in our work, and, hopefully, reach out to lots of teachers and students around the world along the way.
So, as I travel this year, Katie will feature some of my Map Mates blog posts on Classroom Bridges to share my experience in schools across the globe and I, in turn, will promote Classroom Bridges as one tool to help teachers that I meet form connections.
You can check out Classroom Bridges and find a classroom to collaborate with here: http://www.classroombridges.com/find-a-classroom/
Please stop back to follow along with our partnership throughout the year both here on mapmates.org and over at www.classroombridges.com!
