Starting the new school year off "the Globaloria Way"

As the 2010-2011 school year begins this month, 50 Globaloria educators throughout the state of West Virginia are delivering their content standards and objectives in highly innovative and engaging ways that students across the nation have been waiting for.

Globaloria educators and their classrooms are equipped with flip cams, laptops, web voice and video conferencing capabilities, and skills that were sharpened at Globaloria’s July and August Summer Academies at the West Virginia Center for Professional Development. The trainings at WVCPD, which were lead by World Wide Workshop staff and Globaloria mentor educators, provided both beginner and returning Globaloria educators with on-going teacher professional development to engage students in harnessing Web 2.0 tools to research, report out on, and produce digital artifacts that demonstrate subject mastery.

More than twelve hundred students in 41 West Virginia schools will participate in Globaloria this year. They will be taught by 50 education leaders who teach a plethora of different subjects in a variety of different settings. The diverse Globaloria-WV educator community consists of professors who teach game design courses at community colleges, educators who lead classrooms at alternative education centers, and teachers in WV public middle schools and high schools who lead classes ranging from Math, Drafting, Language Arts, and Digital Imaging, to Social Studies, Music, Biology, Chemistry, and Earth Science.

These diverse classrooms have a common--but significant-- link. They are all made up of West Virginia students who will be creating blogs on the subjects they are learning about, conducting on-line research, making multi-media presentations on their findings, producing educational video games, and creating wikis to collaborate, share code and work in teams with other Globaloria students from around the state, just as their educators did this summer. They will do things "the Globaloria Way."

By David Lowenstein, State Director, Globaloria-WV