Shiver Me Timbers...A Great Piratical Collaboration.

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Photo from Flickr sourced under creative Commons Licence - Yarrrr!!! by turbojoe

It all started with a "tweet"...
Friday night sitting in front of my computer as I often do, periodically glancing up as I hear the familiar "ping" of another set of tweets streaming by. One tweet in particular catches my eye digitalmaverick wants to know if others plan to participate in International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Intrigued, I think about for a moment and then decide - why not? I tweet back. heymilly is keen too, we discuss the possibility of a Skype call between classes. digitalmavericksays he'd love to do that but the time zone differences would make it interesting. I think about it for a moment and suggest a VoiceThread, everyone likes the idea so I offer to create it and start trawling Flickr for creative commons pictures relating to pirates - would you believe how many there are? heymilly suggests a wiki to pull the project together, immediately she's on it starting to create our project wiki here. Lenva tweets to count her in too and offers to create the graphics and home page - she's a wiki whizz! Meanwhile tasteach, Allanahk and many more are surfing the net for us, suggesting links and just generally getting into the spirit of the whole thing.
By lunchtime yesterday (Saturday) the whole wiki was in place, complete with graphics and a VoiceThread. I even managed to get my poor laryngitis ravaged vocal chords to cooperate long enough for me to drawl a piratical message in my best pirate voice to introduce the VoiceThread. Our wiki keeps getting better all the time with more and more bits added.
I was absolutely chuffed this afternoon to read this blog post written by fmanning about our Friday night endeavours.

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I think the thing that has amazed me the most about this whole process is how one chance remark on Twitter has led to this amazing, collaborative effort which is now available for global classes to join in on if they so choose. Could we have done this even a couple of years ago? Would it have been as easy to put together? Would we even had access to the right tools and software on line in order to easily achieve our aim? The power of the web is a source of endless wonder and fascination to me. There is so much potential, especially in light of Web 2.0 technologies. I think it's vital for all educators to become comfortable and familiar with the tools available so that we really can infuse these seamlessly and authentically within our classroom programmes.

And, all that aside, it was great fun! I enjoyed working with others in that way to achieve a common goal - imagine what our kids would make of being able to co-construct a web based project with others in different parts of the city, country, globe!

So avast me hearties! Be ye willin' to join yer pirate bretheren this Friday? Hoist the colours...Yo ho!