It seems I got quite a few emails this past summer from people wanting their classes to do projects with my classes. Usually from a coordinator level – county, district, or building, but rarely teachers.

So I’ve been mulling over this for the last several months. What is the best “next step” when two coordinators want to have their schools do connections? What are the starting points?

Here’s what I’ve come up with. Please comment & share your ideas too!

Starting with Enthusiastic Teachers
One way to start is to contact teachers who love VC already and see if they have any ideas for connecting to this particular location. Often they can come up with a curriculum based idea that works and that the other location woud want to do.

Coordinators Designing Projects
Another way to start is for the coordinators to suggest some possibilities to their teachers. For example, one of the locations I’m working with is in the United Kingdom. I know that I have high school classes studying British Literature. It seems logical that we could think of some projects the classes could do together. We can ask each other questions to start brainstorming. Things to think about are:

• What is the curriculum locally?
• What curriculum covers communication/presentation skills?
• What curriculum covers information that is geographically outside your area?
• What curriculum might be similar between our two areas?

Plan a Workshop Together
A crazier idea (logistically) is to do a VC project planning workshop together. I got this idea from the 123 Jazzing Up Your Curriculum with VC workshop from this summer. If the two locations could connect two VCs at a time – and have a group of math/science teachers and a group of language arts/social studies teacher together – they could talk to each other about projects. I haven’t done this yet so I’m just thinking out loud! An overview of VC projects could be shared with the whole group and then they could split into groups to plan. The projects workshop resources on my VC projects wiki would be helpful for doing this.

I’m still mulling this over, trying to think of how we can take advantage of the opportunities to connect with each other in a logical organized fashion. If you have any ideas, please share them by commenting.