Global collaboration in kindergarten? Clearly, I am not the first to try this, but considering the results already, I hope to inspire a few of you.

Today's educator needs to look beyond traditional methods of teaching core subjects towards supporting 21st century learning beginning with our youngest learners if they are to compete in a global society. Using a private Twitter account, we follow and are followed by kindergarten classrooms across the globe. Students dictate their tweets and ask and respond to questions a minimum of once a week while learning about print concepts, mathematics, world languages, geography, cultural diversity, communication and problem solving. Tweets are projected onto an interactive whiteboard. Kindergarteners type in sight words, punctuation, count words and delete words when we are over the quota. They understand that a character is a letter, space or punctuation mark. Sometimes we count backwards, add, subtract and reword sentences to make them fit. They ask questions such as, "Do you play with Lego's? Do you have a playground and play with blocks?" They want to know their favorite cartoon. And they see commonalities when two countries responded that they both like rice and beans and pizza. We uploaded the flag of each country rather than pictures. The students have learned to recognize each country by their flag.

Tweets are short, succinct and lend themselves to the short attention-span of the five year-old. Twitter is not time-sensitive and allows for conversations that will work across different time-zones.  My goal is to teach young learners that there is a huge world out there, with children who play and go to school just like them. I hope to send them down a path of developing respect, responsibility, and knowledge about the people with whom we share the earth and open their eyes and hearts to children and cultures everywhere.