This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Global Virtual Classroom Contest 2004 -- My sideproject continues. Global Virtual Classroom, a web-based collaborative project for elementary and secondary schools around the world, has just opened up the registration process for next year's website design contest. This past year, we initially attracted almost 100 schools that built 26 websites -- 13 each in the primary and secondary school categories. Award winners were announced last month, and a fair number of last year's participants have taken advantage of the early registration period to assure a place in this year's contest. Thirteen of them applied in the just first few hours following the announcement.
We're hoping to attract our limit of 300 schools for the 2004/05 school year contest. Especially, any readers in Asia, the Mid-East, South America, or Africa should know we would like to involve more schools from those regions this year. One of our award winning sites, built by schools from Russia, Puerto Rico, and Italy took a prize despite being the only team that was mistakenly put together without a native-English-speaking school on the team. In addition to that accomplishment, one participating school in particular, from Tashkent in Uzbekistan, touched our hearts. One of the students from there told us in her feedback that she thought it was great that people who had never met outside a computer could work together so well. A week later, we all held our breath as Tashkent was rocked by marketplace bombings and rockets, and the connection to the school was lost. One of the teachers on the team with that school said that in their everyday review of current events, something like this would have normally slipped by among the stories, but when this one came up, first a hush fell across his class, and then animated discussion about the region and their long distance cyberfriends. These are the kinds of connections that are what the Global Virtual Classroom is really all about.
I would like to encourage anyone with children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, or young friends to pass this information along to their teachers, schools, or school systems.
I don't usually go trolling for linkage, but I would like to ask my blogging buddies out there to help spread the word about the program. In addition to participants, we're looking for sponsors for some new, larger hosting that can support new features like chat for the kids to work with as well. Check out the work that these kids put together last year, and if you agree that it's worthwhile (and I'm sure you will), please pass it along.
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