We Skyped with 3rd Graders in Canada!

We finished our book titled The One and Only Ivan as part of the Global Read Aloud.  I, as well as the students, were sad to see the story come to an end!  It was a wonderful story about friendship and sorrow.  The book also had many opportunities for us to make inferences, (and for us to shed a few tears) which is exactly what we have been working on in literacy.

As part of our collaboration with schools across the country, we ended with a big "Skype date" with some third graders from Canada!  We chatted for over 30 minutes and could have gone on much longer.  It was awesome!  We learned a little bit about their school, we shared information about us, and then we had a chance to ask each other questions and share our answers.  The students did a super job and thought it was so "cool" to be able to do something like that.  I told them it is only the beginning.  Below is a picture of their class and a student asking us a question through Skype.

With the Global Read Aloud, we used Twitter, Edmodo, our blog pages, and Skype to collaborate and share thoughts and activities that connected to the book.  The students get so excited when we check our Twitter account to see if we have more followers, post different things,  and read what others are sharing.  Most of our followers are classes around the world.   I thought it would be cool to map our followers so here they are!  As you can see, we have followers in every country except Africa.  I am working on that!!!  Our next project is to make a video sharing information about Iowa for our friends in a class in Australia.  The students are anxious to start that next week.    We would have liked to Skype with them, but they are sleeping when we are in school.....that wouldn't work out so well.  :)

Here is a map of our Twitter followers as of now.  There will continue to be more and more as the year goes along.  We met our friends who we Skyped with yesterday through Twitter.