Since I joined Twitter a few months ago, I have quickly seen the value in connecting with educators from around the world.  I would like my students to have some of the same opportunities.  The Global Read Aloud Project seems to me like a great vehicle for these connections. Beginning with a common framework of the same book, many classes of students will have the opportunity to interact with other students.  Whether the interactions are discussion groups through chat or Skype, reading each other’s blogs, or any other option, the chance to learn and interact with other people outside our local community is highly valuable to me.  I hope that you’ll consider joining this project and learning with right along with the over one hundred people who have already signed up.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to participate in the project and contribute this guest post about the Global Read Aloud. When I stumbled upon the twitter post announcing the concept of connecting classrooms with a story, I thought that it was a brilliant idea that I just had to get involved in! We began reading the story online, projecting it on our SMARTBoard.

Students took turns using the hand-held microphone for our new sound field system while reading aloud. Our special education class had more volunteers anxiously waiting for their next turn than in any other read aloud situation we’ve encountered. As we became more interested in the story we wanted to see the actual book. This allowed us to take our story mobile and we finished reading the story in our new outdoor classroom. It did bring me a little pleasure to see their desire
to physically hold the story and appreciate the pages (a little balance in our technology-focused school).

The vocabulary in the story was a little out-dated and above some of my students in this congregated setting, however the numerous characters introduced throughout were interesting enough to capture their attention and imagination. We used this project to introduce many web tools that we’ll be using this year. It was amazing to share our character vokis, wallwisher and voicethread predictions, animoto videos displaying our illustrations, and tagsxedo word clouds on the Global Read Aloud wiki .

Even more amazing were the connections we were making with other classes beyond our own school building. The relationships developed during conversations about the story and introductions to class/school/town were fabulous. We were able to connect twice through a chat site, twitter numerous times, and skype on two occasions. During these sessions, we had wonderful discussions with a grade 2 class in New Brunswick, another in Pennsylvania, a grade 4 class in Wisconsin, a 5/6 class in Nova Scotia, and a grade 6 class in Iowa! We mapped out the route we would take to travel between schools and posted them to our own class wiki page. Not only did we connect about the characters and plot development of the story, we shared pictures and school website links. I am convinced it is these connections that made the project such a success.

Thank you once again for organizing such an amazing reading network for our students and providing them a place to showcase their ideas and interpretations. I look forward to future involvement with these projects. I am even more excited to maintain some of our Global Read Aloud connections throughout the year ahead.

Here is how it will go:
Inspired by Jeff Howe #1b1t

• Right now – nominate the book you would like to read aloud.
• Next – We select the shared read aloud.  The book has to be of general interest, appeal to a large age group of students, be appropriate, hopefully translated into other languages and be freely available.
• Then – We determine the start date and start reading aloud, blogging, tweeting, skyping, wiki’ing and sharing.