The April newsletter from Wikispaces highlights an excellent example of wiki collaboration between schools at great physical distance from each other – in this case Canada and the United Kingdom. The project focuses on how the countries handle various environmental issues, and the students’ own responsibility to the environment:

Our Space: The Flat Planet Wikispace is for an online collaborative project between students in two religious education classes in Catholic High Schools in Canada and the United Kingdom. The students were given the task of examining environmental issues affecting both Canada and the U.K. and to think about the ethical/moral responsibility of Roman Catholics with regard to the environment.

Our Community: The two teachers who set up this project are Simon O’Carroll (mroc) in Canada and Neil D’Aguiar (ndaguiar) in the United Kingdom. There are also a number of guest judges who will be helping out with the project. They are: Mrs. Vicki Davis (brightideaguru) of Camilla, Georgia whose award winning Flat Classroom Project was an inspiration, Sharon Peters (speters) of Montreal, Quebec who is also a leader in online collaboration, and Chris Betcher (betch) from Sydney, Australia who introduced me to Wikispaces and to Web 2.0 in general when he was on a teaching exchange at my school in Canada. We have one more judge joining the project, Chris Cosstick (ccosst1) from London, England, and he had never heard of a wiki until this project-so we’re spreading the word! There are 48 students working in collaboration on this project.

Our Experience with Wikispaces: The thing that we like about Wikispaces is the ease of use. It was fairly simple to figure out how to use the Wikispaces editing tools. Within a few minutes we had set up our Flat Planet Wikispaces site and were laying the groundwork for our students to begin their collaboration. I especially like the ability to easily embed things such as video, audio, and other types of media into the wiki.

Thanks to Adam Frey of Wikispaces for permission to reprint here!