Godspell’s ‘Thank You’ Postcards Collaboration

Posted: 12 August 2020

Overview

Godspell College in Argentina led a collaborative project for students aged 10-12 to connect students from different countries to create an act of kindness for frontline workers during the pandemic. In groups, the students created an act of kindness based on the different multiple intelligences. Then they uploaded a video on FlipGrid showing their work and presenting themselves to students from other schools.

Planning

As the lead school, our first step was to upload our project in the Round Square collaboration platform. And we were contacted by a lot of schools that were interested in joining us. We then organised a zoom meeting with The Punjab Public School, KC Public School, The British School, Vivek High School, and Pathways World School, Collingwood School and MacLachlan College to introduce ourselves and to speak about what the project consisted of. After that, we created a shared chart with all the children who were going to be involved, in order to create and organize the meetings between them. We created an agenda as well so everyone knew the relevant dates for meetings and deadlines for submitting work.

Details

Our driving question was “How can I create and publish a THANK YOU NOTE to give emotional support to people working on the front line?”

And to support that we set the following understanding goals:

When defining the procedures we decided we would have two zoom meetings grouped by time zones in order for everyone to participate. In the first meeting students introduced themselves, talked about how they were feeling and compared lifestyles between their countries.

The next activity that students were invited to do was to reflect upon the following questions: What is an act of kindness? What are some examples of acts of kindness?

During these times, who would need an act of kindness? Following this, they had to choose the receiver of their note (it could be doctors, nurses, police officers, firefighters, trash collectors or city maintenance personnel) and think about how they were exposing their lives for others during the pandemic. Once they had made their choice, they wrote a THANK YOU note for them. To make sure they could share their work with the rest of the group they had to create a 15 second video per group naming their school or country and showing or reading the card on the video.

Once this was accomplished, we had a second meeting during which students shared who they wrote to, why they chose that person, what they were thanking them for and what type of impact they believed this action had.

The final product can be seen here (Password: RoundSquare)

Challenges

The major challenge we encountered was to connect all the students in virtual meetings with different time zones. We were able to resolve this issue by establishing different sessions. We had meetings with students from Canada one day and then meetings with the students from India another day. In the end, everyone was able to connect with Canada, India and Argentina.

Impact

We believe that there was great and significant learning accomplished from this project. Children felt as real citizens of the world by communicating with different countries. They were able to exchange experiences and thoughts about their situation with other children from around the world and this allowed them to gain new perspectives. They were able to express themselves in proper English. And they were able to create and publish small acts of kindness to give emotional support to frontline workers and thus add their small contribution to general well being.

Long term outcomes

We were able to connect our students on an international level. The project allowed us to establish constant communications and friendships. This is definitely something to be done again. Especially during difficult times, it is important for kids to connect with other children to understand that they are not alone in what they are feeling or going through.

Advice

Author: Antonella Barbagallo – Carolina Villanueva, Year 6 teacher, Godspell College

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