The Arkansas-Beijing Connection
One evening in January 2018, I began receiving several teacher librarian followers on Twitter from Beijing, China. After interacting with a few of them on Twitter, I discovered that Joyce Valenza was presenting at a conference there and had mentioned our library program at Lakeside High School. I was am so grateful she did this because it led to something special for our learners. It didn't take long to start conversing with Kristen Billings, a teacher librarian in Beijing. We started discussing the possibilities of an international collaboration. I returned to school the next day and talked to Mr. Keith Todd, one of our 9th-grade Civics and Geography teachers at Lakeside, about some type of international connection for his students. He had witnessed our recent 8th-grade maker collaboration with social studies classes, and he had the desire to have his students create some type of product to share with our new friends in Beijing. I introduced Kristen and Keith to Flipgrid, and...