4.3 Diversity, Cultural Understanding & Global Awareness
Candidates model and facilitate the use of digital tools and resources to support diverse student needs, enhance cultural understanding, and increase global awareness. (PSC 4.3/ISTE 5c)
Artifact: Diversity, Cultural Understanding and Global Awareness Blog Post
Standard 4.3 Reflection: Diversity, Cultural Understanding & Global Awareness
The Diversity, Cultural Understanding and Global Awareness blog post was created for the Internet Tools for the Classroom course. The purpose of the assignment was to describe how blogging affects the way we communicate and collaborate on a local and global scale. Further, the blog post tasked candidates with thoroughly describing how the use of the Internet in the classroom helps to develop a student’s understanding of and respect for diversity and how it increases their cultural understanding and global awareness. The blog post specifically documents my attitudes and dispositions as it pertains to being an educator with a culturally responsive pedagogy.
The artifact demonstrates my ability to model and facilitate the use of digital tools and resources to support diverse student needs, enhance cultural understanding and to increase global awareness. It is of great importance that the power of the Internet is used to leverage students toward greater cultural and global awareness. Not only that, as instructional technology coaches it is equally imperative that we model cultural responsiveness for our colleagues. The internet can not only make are world smaller, but it can also make our world views larger. The artifact clearly indicates my attitudes and dispositions regarding cultural responsiveness, and because of these reasons, I feel the artifact is a direct indicator of mastery of the Diversity, Cultural Understanding & Global Awareness standard.
Further, I strive to make my computer lab a place that accommodates a diverse range of learners as I see every single student in my school. Every lesson that I create for my students has multiple difficultly levels embedded into the learning experience to extend differentiation opportunities to students. Additionally, I try to anchor, when possible, my lessons to state and national social studies content standards to continuously enhance the cultural understanding and global awareness of my students. There are lots of wonderful cultural and global learning opportunities that can occur in the computer lab setting and it is my goal to continuously extend these opportunities to students.
I would have loved for this assignment to have occurred after my Cultural Issues in ESOL course. Pursuing the ESOL endorsement has provided a depth to my pedagogy that I value tremendously. If I were to revisit this blog posting again, I would add additional focus to the fact that the Internet can combat prejudice through exposure to other cultures, thus fostering greater understanding. It is so important that students are globally minded and tolerant of one another. Placing an emphasis on cultural understanding in the classroom ensures that all learners will succeed. These and other insights would have been excellent points in my blog post. Overall, the learning experience was a great reflective exercise and has definitely positively impacted student learning at my school. Further, I learned a great deal about the importance of 21st century learners being globally minded. I have used Air Pano, Flash Earth, Google World Wonders with my first graders to explore other countries as part of a continents lesson. Through teacher observation, I was able to ascertain and assess that students’ left the class with a broader view of the world thus impacting their learning. Anything we can do as educators to put the world in the hands of students is a step in the right direction towards instilling our 21st century learners with a global awareness and understanding.
The Diversity, Cultural Understanding and Global Awareness blog post was created for the Internet Tools for the Classroom course. The purpose of the assignment was to describe how blogging affects the way we communicate and collaborate on a local and global scale. Further, the blog post tasked candidates with thoroughly describing how the use of the Internet in the classroom helps to develop a student’s understanding of and respect for diversity and how it increases their cultural understanding and global awareness. The blog post specifically documents my attitudes and dispositions as it pertains to being an educator with a culturally responsive pedagogy.
The artifact demonstrates my ability to model and facilitate the use of digital tools and resources to support diverse student needs, enhance cultural understanding and to increase global awareness. It is of great importance that the power of the Internet is used to leverage students toward greater cultural and global awareness. Not only that, as instructional technology coaches it is equally imperative that we model cultural responsiveness for our colleagues. The internet can not only make are world smaller, but it can also make our world views larger. The artifact clearly indicates my attitudes and dispositions regarding cultural responsiveness, and because of these reasons, I feel the artifact is a direct indicator of mastery of the Diversity, Cultural Understanding & Global Awareness standard.
Further, I strive to make my computer lab a place that accommodates a diverse range of learners as I see every single student in my school. Every lesson that I create for my students has multiple difficultly levels embedded into the learning experience to extend differentiation opportunities to students. Additionally, I try to anchor, when possible, my lessons to state and national social studies content standards to continuously enhance the cultural understanding and global awareness of my students. There are lots of wonderful cultural and global learning opportunities that can occur in the computer lab setting and it is my goal to continuously extend these opportunities to students.
I would have loved for this assignment to have occurred after my Cultural Issues in ESOL course. Pursuing the ESOL endorsement has provided a depth to my pedagogy that I value tremendously. If I were to revisit this blog posting again, I would add additional focus to the fact that the Internet can combat prejudice through exposure to other cultures, thus fostering greater understanding. It is so important that students are globally minded and tolerant of one another. Placing an emphasis on cultural understanding in the classroom ensures that all learners will succeed. These and other insights would have been excellent points in my blog post. Overall, the learning experience was a great reflective exercise and has definitely positively impacted student learning at my school. Further, I learned a great deal about the importance of 21st century learners being globally minded. I have used Air Pano, Flash Earth, Google World Wonders with my first graders to explore other countries as part of a continents lesson. Through teacher observation, I was able to ascertain and assess that students’ left the class with a broader view of the world thus impacting their learning. Anything we can do as educators to put the world in the hands of students is a step in the right direction towards instilling our 21st century learners with a global awareness and understanding.