Trading PD for Project Partners

Here’s an interesting model for finding partners. If you’ve been reading my blog, you know I’ve been working on finding partners for our 6th grade classes studying Canada. This week I found the last set in an interesting way.

In August at the Alberta Broadband Summer Institute I collected business cards of several schools willing to connect to our 6th grade classes.

In following up with one of them, I discovered that this particular district, Peace River, has used VC mainly for high school classes. So while they were interested in connecting to us, they need more info on enrichment VCs.

So on Tuesday I did an hour workshop for them with an overview of field trips, resources, examples of projects, MysteryQuest, and more. And then in the last 20 minutes, I sprung my request on them! By the end of the hour, I had partner teachers for the last four slots I needed to fill! So we traded PD for project partners and it worked great for both of us!

I think we all like to compare weather at the beginning of a VC, and when you’re in Michigan and the snow just melted and it’s raining, you want to know the weather in northern Alberta! So I asked them to show me the snow out the window. Listen to Fred Churchman’s description of that moment in our training:

It’s the little things that sometimes stick in my mind: I think I’ll always remember looking out your window at the wet mess, and then going to the trouble of moving the monitor and camera to make sure you got to see the snow outside our window. Thanks for that memory!

By the way, above the picture is from the Confluence Project.

Thank you, Peace River, Alberta, for yet another VC and the promise of more to come!

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