Flickr: A.gonzalez

If everything goes as hoped by supporters of the Connect All Schools Initiative, every school in the U.S. will be connected to schools abroad by 2016.

Whether that’s through physical or virtual exchanges, and whether it’s in order learn foreign languages, solve global issues, collaborate on new media projects, or extend professional development opportunities to teachers (to name just a few), the goal is the same: Get U.S. schools linked with the world so that kids can foster global understanding, communicate with different cultures and countries, and learn in a way that’s exciting and meaningful.

Officially launched on March 19, 2011 at the Celebration of Teaching and Learning, the campaign is led by the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN-USA) and managed in partnership with 84 other organizations (and counting).

How do those organizations intend to reach their goal? Through stories. The Connect All Schools website is essentially a clearinghouse where teachers and students can share how they’ve connected with the world and inspire others to do the same (or something quite different).

“If teachers could tell their stories — what they’re doing, what impact it had on their students, how it changed their classroom, how it prepared their students for the 21st Century, and what organizations they worked with to make it happen, other teachers would be able to say, ‘I can do that,’” says iEARN-USA Executive Director Ed Gragert.

And, via this interface, they’d be able to actually do it. If a school worked with the Asia Society on a project, for instance, an interested teacher could click through to the Asia Society’s Web site and contact them for more information.

While there are some sites that collect international education projects and link students and teachers (see a previous MindShift post for examples), there isn’t a lot of comprehensive, aggregated information out there about what’s already happening in U.S. schools, says Gragert.

And it’s important. Thanks in part to “the Partnership for 21st Century Skills movement,” he says, “there’s been the recognition that it’s not just about science and math; students also need reading and writing skills, they need global awareness, they need to know how to work in teams, they need to know how to use technology.” And years of iEARN project evaluation shows that “having an authentic audience of their peers gets kids motivated.” Gragert and initiative partners call this “learning with the world, not just about it.”

For example, a Skype conference between students in Redwood City, California, and Karachi and Rawalpindi/Islamabad, Pakistan, to discuss youth-produced journalism, will soon be written up on the Connect All Schools site. The students in Karachi are involved in an Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) filmmaking project (check out this MindShift post about AYV) and the Rawalpindi/Islamabad students produce content for World Youth News. The Redwood City students work on both projects. Under Secretary of State Judith McHale attended the call, sharing with the students how important these kind of virtual exchanges are becoming for diplomacy.

Other Connect All Schools stories so far include: Online collaboration between U.S. students and students in eight different countries to address local and global environmental issues, online debates between Washingon, D.C. and Qatari students, and teacher and student exchanges between Iowa and the Ukraine.

“The response from education organizations on this has been dramatic,” says Gragert. “We’re getting requests for new partnerships every day. We want this to go a bit viral. But it’s only going to happen if we all work together, and if we don’t see it as, ‘Everybody must do it my way.’” Despite the hefty aims of a five-year plan, “I think we can do it, absolutely,” he says. “It’s just not going to look the same in every school.”

Flickr: Listen Up!

By Sara Bernard

Over the past five years, more than 27,000 students from Australia to Senegal to San Francisco have made films and other media about a wide range of subjects — from young refugees, to how to improve public education in the U.S., to environmental preservation, racial and gender discrimination, and more. They’ve produced their work in and outside of school and have taken it to festivals like Cinequest and Sundance.

The common thread with all these projects is Adobe Youth Voices (AYV), which is part of the Adobe Foundation. As a non-profit arm of a for-profit company, AYV supports  youth media and education organizations (including Listen Up!, the Bay Area Video Coalition, Reel Works, Radio Rookies, iEARN, and the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network) by providing grants, collaborative partnerships, professional development, tech tools and resources, and a worldwide network of teachers, students, and professionals making media together.

The premise behind the program: Media-making enables students to express themselves, address important global issues, and — as they’re using the latest technology to work on community-based projects, still a rare breed in most classrooms – to “bridge that gap between school and what’s going to happen when they leave school,” says AYV program manager Patricia Cogley.

The National Youth Listening Tour, for instance, is a program sponsored by the Department of Education to help reduce dropout rates and improve public education through youth input, and AYV student media will be featured in Boston, Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Project VoiceScape is a new partnership between Adobe Youth Voices, the PBS Foundation, and PBS’ POV that pairs young people with award-winning documentary filmmakers to help mentor emerging artists and showcase their work at festivals nationwide.

And through a partnership with DonorsChoose.org, anyone can help support specific school projects such as “What Matters Most: Kids Find Their Voice Using Technology,” a multimedia project for fourth and fifth graders in Seattle, WA.

While most of the work AYV does is through partnerships with other foundations or media organizations, interested teachers and project leaders can now access AYV Essentials: free curricula, lesson plans, student stories, and other resources that AYV staff have combed through and tagged as particularly successful.

AYV’s aim is not “to convince everyone to be media-makers,” though, says Cogley. “It’s about engagement. Young people who identify that they have a story to tell or a message to give to a community experience a real boost in self-esteem. They start to see that their opinion matters.”

(Check here for a recent round table discussion with AYV senior manager Miguel Salinas and lead educator Gregg Witkin about 21st century learning and arts education on KQED’s Forum).