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I hope you'll forgive the posts about upcoming projects in the Flat Classroom family but so many things are getting ready to start and some of you may not have heard about some of these projects. The Eracism project was invented by students at the first Flat Classroom conference in Doha Qatar and was voted up by the world of educators and students as being most needed. They were so right! Last semester we ran 4 brackets (2 middle school and 2 high school). The debates begin by debating on Voicethread and the finals are synchronous in Blackboard Collaborate. We're excited to be working with ObaWorld as a result of meeting Yong Zhao at ISTE this summer. We'll be beta testing this platform for use with future projects.  So, I copied an email that Julie Lindsay just sent out to our mailing list and am inviting any of you who would like to do this. It doesn't take a lot of time, but you do need to help students prepare to field a team. My classroom actually won the first c...

We are so excited about this Thursday and the Finals of the Eracism Project!  Our presentation for k12 online will also be going online this week as well, so you can "look under the hood," so to speak!  The 2009 global debate project for middle schoolers, the Eracism Project (a Flat Classroom TM Project www.eracismproject.org ) will hold the finals of Eracism on the private Eracism grid on ReactionGrid on Thursday, December 17 at 9:15 am EST – 10:15 EST .  Although the students and judges for this project will be in-world, the presentation will be streamed live with a backchannel as part of the K12 Online Conference 2009 to CCiTV Live – http://ccitv.cciu.org/ and ReactionGrid  http://livestream.com/snowcrash . Student finalists will be debating “Differences Make us Stronger” in the impromptu style debate moderated by Bernajean Porter ( http://www.digitales.us ) with the final vote on the winner taken from the judges and student participants in the project wh...

 Oh, we're so excited about the new project, Eracism .  ( www.eracismproject.org ) Please take a read and sign up if you'd like to pilot a classroom or serve as an advisor, debate coach, or judge.  We appreciate Elluminate signing on as a sponsor of Flat Classroom(tm) projects because this has allowed us to keep the projects free and open to everyone AND freed us up to start new projects such as this one.  Also look for an elementary project coming early next year for science. ( Send me an email if you're interested in that one also.) At the Flat Classroom(tm) Conference in Doha, Qatar in January 2009, a visionary group of students proposed that a series of debates be held to promote awareness of racism on a global basis and how we need to work together to solve the world's problems. This multi-national group of four students proposed their project and were promoted through an extensive voting process including a global vote on the next project to be run by t...