Telecollaborative Lesson Plan

Telecollaborative lesson is an educational project that involves students and teachers from one place to different locations at anytime; different state, country, or continent in the world. Usually students would use the Internet tools to communicate with each other via e-mail, chat room, Web conferencing, sometimes audio and video conferencing to exchange information, shared documents, ideas, or reflect on their personal practices. The students benefit all the advantages of the cooperative and collaborative approach but also benefit the opportunity to visit some places that they never thought they would see in reality. The students have a chance to shared ideas with professionals, experts from everywhere in the world. The students learn from others student’s culture and promote global awareness. One the best benefits would be that students, educators have access to a variable of resources that would not be available to them in not using telecollaborative approach.
Dr. Judy Harris, a respected leader in technology integration had created eight step when create a telecollaborative lesson plan. The first step is to choose a curricular goal. In this step students are required to stay in the curriculum line. Usually, student would choose activities that cannot be done with tools from a normal classroom. The second step is to choose Activity’s structure. In this step students and teacher are to choose previously made online projects that other classroom created and shared through the web in order to ease the planning process. Once find those successful projects, students and teacher would explore those activities and create their own lesson plan; this is the third step called Explore examples previously made project. The fourth step is to determine the step of the project. Student would organize the tools available; create titles and subtitles, and all the details necessary to enter the project.
The fifth step is to invite all the students in which you intend to study with either send an email or use any other connection system you have available. The sixth step is forming the telecollaborative group in start detailing the project. The seventh step would be to communicate with each other, that’s when sharing ideas comes to life. The eight and last step is the closure, this is where usually a report, presentation is made to communicate sometimes to a larger group what has been done or learned.
In conclusion, the telecollaborative lesson is a way to expand the collaborative approach to a wider group either from building to building, state to state, country to country, or any part to the world.