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Employing Global Collaboration to Develop Student Communication Skills Using the Water Cycle
As interconnections between diverse people across the world continue to grow, developing effective communication skills becomes even more important to fostering relationships and understandings. Communication skills are often lacking in students, according to educators and STEM workplace employers (Gray, Emerson, and MacKay 2005; Trilling and Fadel 2009). As a result, educators must search for strategies to improve students' communication skills, while still aligning lessons to state and national standards (Bellanca and Stirling 2011; Brazell 2013).
Global collaboration projects that use Web 2.0 tools (video conferencing and online discussion boards) allow students to interact and communicate with peers in ways that are not possible in the traditional classroom setting. Given the distance between international classrooms, students can creatively use a variety of communication skills and technology to ask questions, explain key ideas, frame arguments with data, listen with understanding, and challenge claims; all of which are essential STEM communication skills (AAAS 1993; NGSS Lead States 2013; NRC 2012).
To help students enhance their communication skills in STEM, we introduced a 5E TechnologyEnhanced Project Based Learning (TEPBL) global collaboration at the end of the school year as a threeweek culminating project on the water cycle and weather. Students developed models describing the water cycle, illustrating the possible ways a pollutant may enter the water cycle, and creating an argument to support or refute the idea that local weather patterns may affect the spread of a pollutant. This topic addressed global commonalities that were essential to facilitate a relevant and active discussion.
Preparation
Prior to the start of the TEPBL, connection to a global partner (teacher/s and his/her classroom of students) is needed. We used the website ePals to find our global partners (see Resources for additional recommended sites). With this site, you create a user account and classroom profile with your collaboration interests, then search by content and grade level to locate a classroom that best suits your needs.
After sending messages about our project idea through the website to a dozen classrooms around the world, we quickly located partners in France and China who were interested in working with us. While other classrooms responded with initial interest, schedules or response times prevented us...