Get organized, then get tech<\/h1>\n

Many of your current — or future — collaborators teach at other schools around the state or world. But when you’ve got a great idea for collaboration, don’t let distance stand in your way. Let’s look at this example from three Vermont schools on how to plan, manage and support one unit run across three different schools.<\/p>\n

(Hint: tech helps. A lot.)<\/p>\n

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“We all carry a story in us. And the stories we carry, they burn.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Teachers at three different Vermont middle schools set out to create a cross-school experience meant to help their students better understand immigration. Students would be tasked with learning how to sensitively and accurately interview immigrants about their stories, then work to produce documentaries from the interviews. The students would then share and reflect on each other’s documentaries.<\/p>\n

A challenging unit for one class to implement, but doing it with three at three different schools?<\/p>\n

This was going to take work.<\/p>\n

Chris Bologna from Lamoille Union Middle School, Allison Paradee and Peter Nichols from Hazen, and Shaun Noonan from Peoples Academy made the commitment in the summer of 2017 at a Schoology Next conference to co-build the Immigration Migration Project. They knew once back at their respective schools and pulled into the daily routines they would need efficient and effective ways to collaborate virtually.<\/p>\n

5 tech tools to keep you organized: Schoology, Trello, Slack, Google Drive & flipgrid<\/h2>\n

All were inspired that Schoology, the Learning Management System all three schools used provided a platform for exchanging resources and supporting cross-school sharing via discussion threads and media albums.\u00a0 So, they created a Migration Story Project Group to start sharing possible resources to use.<\/p>\n

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