In December 2006 two classrooms from opposite sides of the world joined in a collaboration that significantly changed their view of how we learn and what we learn.

Called the Flat Classroom Project (http://flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com) and based on The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman, classes from Westwood Schools, GA, USA (Vicki Davis - http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com) and International School Dhaka, Bangladesh (Julie Lindsay - http://123elearning.blogspot.com) collaborated on topics to do with the Ten Flatteners found in the book. Examples include Virtual Reality, Mobile and Ubiquitous, Web 2.0 etc.
We teamed the students according the flattener and gave them the task of creating content on a wiki page as well as creating a personal video that included content from their partner on the other side of the world.

More details about the launch and structure of the project can be found on Vicki's blog at http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2006/11/classroom-is-flat-teacherpreneurs-and.html

This project was a true educational experience. Although some of the students excelled, others had to struggle for a while before they finally "got it." No "magic pill" or "magic software" can automatically engage your students. Although the tools we used are transformational, this project required an ongoing commitment to be connecting, researching, creating content and interacting on a daily basis from both us and our students. We planned the project over six weeks, the project lasted two and a half. We also involved four incredible judges who are leaders in their field to award prizes and give us feedback on how to make such a project scalable and involve many more classrooms.

We believe that it is the professional responsibility of teachers to share their best practices through the social networking tools of blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos, and more that many educators fight. We believe that if educators begin harnessing these social networking tools, we will see a global transformation of education unlike the world has ever seen! Accordingly, we want to share our hard work so that others can see the same excitement that we have witnessed in our own classrooms. Thus, we are writing a series of articles, recording podcasts, and sharing our reflections in a variety of media to document our learning so that other teachers may benefit from our learning.

We came to this project with the ultimate aim of our students having a deeper understanding of the impact of Information Technology (IT) on them and the world. The idea of uniting two classrooms from geographically diverse places was an exciting challenge. Our guiding questions for this project included the typical: 'What do students and classrooms look like, think about, live like, learn at school, on the other side of the flat world?', and the not so typical: 'How can we employ the latest online collaborative tools to link two classrooms together so that they can act like one?' Additionally, because of our subject model, we wanted our students to not only study the flatteners but to literally experience them. This influenced not only the questions we asked, but also the Internet tools they were asked to use as they interacted. We also wanted to embed this multi-cultural and IT-based learning experience into their assessment for the semester therefore we created classroom-specific, criterion-based rubric outlines at the start of the project to give all students a sense of where they were going and what we expected of them.

By using a wiki-centric environment and Web 2.0 tools for real-time and asynchronous communication, we experimented and highlighted connectivity issues and social networking realities in an online world. The use of social networking technologies is pedagogically relevant. Combined with an holistic and multicultural approach the walls of a classroom can be broken down. Our experience with the Flat Classroom Project has reinforced the approach that learning takes place in many different ways, times and places. It also shows us that the research that emphasizes the effectiveness of cooperative learning, genuine assessment, and project-based learning can occur when students are literally on opposite sides of the globe.

The Flat Classroom Project gained recognition from Thomas Friedman himself and won the Edublogs Award for the best wiki in 2006.
Student conversations reviewing the project can be found here: http://123elearning.blogspot.com/2006/12/flat-classroom-conversations-part-1.html and here: http://123elearning.blogspot.com/2006/12/flat-classroom-conversations-part-2.html

Classrooms can be flattened as teachers blog and reach out to those that share a common curricular perspective. This is essential in our world because our students must be knowledgeable about collaborative technology tools. But more importantly, we have connected our technology, now it is time to connect our people, our leaders of tomorrow. For truly, the thing that could most divide us in the future is cultural ignorance which could erect virtual walls amidst the bits and bytes of Internet-based communications. We can be no more connected than the willingness of those who are connecting. Flat classroom projects have the power to produce world class students with a world view based on understanding, not misinformed bias. It will require many hard working, well informed, ethical, diligent teachers and visionary leaders to give them the framework to operate. It will require teachers all over the world accepting and adapting to new modes of learning.

How about you, will you be an advocate for a flat classroom project at your school?