By Tracy Lee Carroll

The world keeps getting smaller. Back when my eleven year old daughter was in Mrs. Stone’s second grade class at World Elementary in Nashua, she was assigned a Flat Stanley project. For those of you who have not yet met Flat Stanley, he is a young man (as told about by Jeff Brown) who had a bulletin board fall on him and flattened him to be only about a half an inch thick. Because of his flatness, he could travel quite nicely in an envelope anywhere in the world. The project was to create your own “Flat Stanley” and send him off to somewhere and have someone take him about, show him a good time and have him write back about his travels.

My daughter made her flat friend, Flat Bobby and I utilized my extensive Flickr network to enable Flat Bobby to circumnavigate the globe. The official project was only supposed to last a few weeks, but my daughter’s project is still ongoing four years later. Flat Bobby has traveled extensively in the United States, Mexico, China, The Philippines, Egypt, Germany, England, The Netherlands, The Bahamas, and Canada. He has sent home many photographs of his adventures as well as trinkets he’s collected. The most wonderful thing of his adventures is my daughter and I learned how small the world really is and how many wonderful people there are in it. We have made lasting relationships with people so far away and learned about their cultural differences while learning that we all have the same basic desires and needs in life.

That was the beginning of my eyes being opened to the possibilities of using Web 2.0 technologies to create pathways for students that were not available to children just a few short years ago. What an opportunity to get kids talking and collaborating with people all over the world! Bringing these ideas and thoughts one step further, I volunteered in my daughter’s fifth and sixth grade classroom last year to teach them about blogging. The idea was to create a Ning network that would be totally private. This satisfied nervous parents’ concerns about their children posting things publicly on the internet. Within the Bridges Ning network, the hope was to get other schools around the world involved and each school group would have their own private area as well as access to the common area in which to share ideas and conversations. The project got off to a great start but due to timing issues, never realized its full intentions.

Due to the project’s huge success in its beginnings, the school has hired me this year to work with both the fifth and sixth grade students to not only continue the project, but to expand upon it. I’ve been given the go ahead to publish a public blog with the kids as well as continue to work on Bridges. To start the year, we have spent the first two weeks going over internet safety and security issues while our relocated computer lab was being set up. The next two weeks have been focused on writing and typing up bios for each of the children. As our lab is no online in a very small capacity it is going to take us a little time in getting all the pieces online and running smoothly, but we are all excited about the possibilities and plans to bring these students online and reaching out into the world. I look forward to sharing more of our story with you as we move along and hopefully soon, I will be able to provide you with a link to our new public sites!

If you would like to contribute in any way to what we are doing or just say hello, you can contact me at tracylee (at) tracylee (dot) com. For more information on Flat Stanley, visit www.flatstanley.com.

About the Author:
Tracy Lee Carroll has held many positions, but her favorite is mother to four wonderful children for 27 years. She is currently opening doors into the world for fifth and sixth graders as she guides them through the waters of getting to know the internet while teaching them the skills they need to be safe. Sharing this knowledge combines two of her greatest passions: working with children and the amazing resource that is the internet.

Tracy has been an art teacher, as well as someone who can claim to have built one of the largest websites single-handedly in the days of the early frontiers of the online world. She has also owned her own graphics design firm and helped produce major magazines and adwork while living in New York. Yes, she is a native NYer, but has lived here in Southern NH long enough to call it home.

These shoes look like they were designed by a three-year-old. Which is very cool, because they were!

Back in June I took a look at the new Vans custom shoe creator. And while I really liked the available options, I was a bit disappointed by the 5-7 week delivery window. But since Vans had kindly provided the shoes, I took my chances and ordered a full size up for my three-year-old daughter.

The shoes arrived just under five weeks after I placed the order. Of course, I was a bit too optimistic in my estimation of how much my daughter would grow in that time and the shoes are still too large for my daughter, but that’s certainly not Vans fault.

The quality of the shoes is excellent and seems identical to off-the-shelf Vans. The colors and fabrics match what we saw on the website during the design process and the seams and gluing are fine, with no loose edges or threads.

Unfortunately, because of my size-guessing failure, I’m unable to comment on their durability. However, I can comment on showing a preschooler the real shoes that she designed on a computer: It was awesome! She was extremely excited and can’t wait to show her friends when she grows into them. Is that worth the premium price of the custom vans? I would say so.

I’m still not fond of the 5-7 week estimated shipping time, but all in all, we had a lot of fun playing with the custom shoe designer and the end result met our expectations. If you’re looking for a cool pair of shoes, and don’t mind the wait, check out shop.vans.com.