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.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Global Virtual Classroom 2005/06 Contest Results -- After working together for the last 5 months, approximately 1,500 students from 63 schools, representing 20 countries around the world unveiled 22 websites as part of the Global Virtual Classroom Contest 2005/06. Today, contest winners in both the primary and secondary school categories have been announced.
With subjects that range from students' heroes to cultural comparisons of their respectivehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif countries, and from ecological concerns to types of national governments, sites from participating teams show the kind of creativity that can come from putting children from different cultures together in a collaborative endeavor. Their efforts were judged for content, presentation, and collaboration.
The Grand Prize winner in the younger primary school category, Different Countries, Different People, Same Dreams, put together by a team from Israel, the USA, and India, provides a look into who the students look up to. National leaders, sports heroes, humanitarian inspirations, and "great thinkers" are profiled in this online "museum," along with individual students' essays on their "personal heroes" from their family and everyday life.
In the older secondary school category, the Grand Prize went to a team of students from Japan and the USA for their site, Holidays/Festivals/Events. This site contains an extensive collection of special days in the two countries, supported by essays, graphics, and animation highlighting the history, significance, and practices associated with them.
The value of the program is not so much in the contest format or the awards or prizes, but in the cross-cultural interaction and in learning about collaboration and communication necessary to accomplish things as a group. Tristan, a student from Illinois who worked on Holidays/Festivals/Events, summed it up by saying "What I have learned about working with other students is that they can create the most amazing things and that they expect to see the same out of you."
The division of labor that the best teams use to develope these sites - with some students doing design and graphics, some writing, and some handling the technicalities of putting the pieces together - allows all of them to contribute "the most amazing things."
Give Something Back International, the sponsoring organization behind the Global Virtual Classroom, would like to thank the students, teachers, judges, and the folks at Nicenet for helping to make this relaunch of the GVC Contest program a great success, and is looking forward to the next contest, for which the application period is now open.
(And to the readers of my blog and feed, a little "blog love" for this project that I've been involved with for 3 years now would be greatly appreciated. We're accepting applications for the 2006/07 program now.)
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