4.3: Diversity, Cultural Understanding and 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: Complete Blog
ITEC 7430 Blog Posting on Diversity - The International Mind
Reflection
The artifact that I have used in this reflection my personal blog post from March 2014 that looked at a plethora of digital tools and resources that I have experience using, or am planning to use, with students to support diverse needs, enhance their cultural understanding, and increase their global awareness.
This post has links to a number of different resources and reflects activities demonstrating mastery of Standard 4.3 – Diversity, Cultural Understanding and Global Awareness.
To support diverse student needs, I included resources that are used in professional development with International Baccalaureate (IB) teachers that help them to understand the concepts and strategies that need to be incorporated in a differentiated classroom setting to support diverse needs, for example the use of Dragon Diction as a tool for students for whom English is not their first language in a mainstream classroom setting.
This blog also talks to my wider experience, external to the classroom, as a project manager in Ireland for a Cultural Understanding project called Dissolving Boundaries through Technology in Education, where students in different cultural contexts and geographical settings used videoconferencing and discussion forums to study similar curriculum and share their united learning from their perspectives. This experience has transitioned into my current position, where I have used this experience to extend student global awareness through discussion with other students in other parts of the world and enhancement of their cultural understanding using the IB International Mindedness teaching and learning.
From completing this artifact, I found myself dipping into my knowledge in education over the last twenty years with the most reflection centering round the experiences when I had not been formally in the classroom. My time with Dissolving Boundaries really started to hone into this standard, as I remembered the kinds of things that I was doing in 1999 – 2001 with much less sophisticated technology to promote peace and understanding between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. Looking at the diverse classroom that I find myself standing in today – an International School in Buckhead, Georgia, with often students from many countries, accents, appearances and languages, I found that the experience of getting students to collaborative across international boundaries using discussion forums and videoconferencing today as beneficial for learning and understanding of diversity and global awareness as useful as it was fifteen years ago. IB states, “Our world needs thinkers, innovators, collaborators and communicators”. I have demonstrated the ability to facilitate this using technology with a flat classroom project and ability to use available technology to support student diversity and needs in a classroom setting.
This blog served as a personal resource while creating tools to foster diversity in the classroom with a view to shifting to the International Mindedness ideas while participating in the working group in Den Haag. I shared this resource with colleagues there – but did not share the ideas in my own school setting. While I did discuss the ideas behind this standard and this resource with the Head of Curriculum and Professional Development, the conversation did not really percolate to the teachers that deliver the curriculum in our classes. On reflection, I would have served my colleagues better by sharing this blog post with the experiences and resources during one of our Wednesday morning group sharing times and initiated a collegial dialogue with them in terms of how they saw diversity, cultural understanding, and global awareness – the international mind, in their own classroom context. Responses to this blog would have made it more meaningful to me and could have ring fenced additional strategies that could be tried. This might have given me a more valuable way to looking at developing our faculty in their International Mindedness protocols and “assessing” what that looks like for student learning.
The artifact that I have used in this reflection my personal blog post from March 2014 that looked at a plethora of digital tools and resources that I have experience using, or am planning to use, with students to support diverse needs, enhance their cultural understanding, and increase their global awareness.
This post has links to a number of different resources and reflects activities demonstrating mastery of Standard 4.3 – Diversity, Cultural Understanding and Global Awareness.
To support diverse student needs, I included resources that are used in professional development with International Baccalaureate (IB) teachers that help them to understand the concepts and strategies that need to be incorporated in a differentiated classroom setting to support diverse needs, for example the use of Dragon Diction as a tool for students for whom English is not their first language in a mainstream classroom setting.
This blog also talks to my wider experience, external to the classroom, as a project manager in Ireland for a Cultural Understanding project called Dissolving Boundaries through Technology in Education, where students in different cultural contexts and geographical settings used videoconferencing and discussion forums to study similar curriculum and share their united learning from their perspectives. This experience has transitioned into my current position, where I have used this experience to extend student global awareness through discussion with other students in other parts of the world and enhancement of their cultural understanding using the IB International Mindedness teaching and learning.
From completing this artifact, I found myself dipping into my knowledge in education over the last twenty years with the most reflection centering round the experiences when I had not been formally in the classroom. My time with Dissolving Boundaries really started to hone into this standard, as I remembered the kinds of things that I was doing in 1999 – 2001 with much less sophisticated technology to promote peace and understanding between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. Looking at the diverse classroom that I find myself standing in today – an International School in Buckhead, Georgia, with often students from many countries, accents, appearances and languages, I found that the experience of getting students to collaborative across international boundaries using discussion forums and videoconferencing today as beneficial for learning and understanding of diversity and global awareness as useful as it was fifteen years ago. IB states, “Our world needs thinkers, innovators, collaborators and communicators”. I have demonstrated the ability to facilitate this using technology with a flat classroom project and ability to use available technology to support student diversity and needs in a classroom setting.
This blog served as a personal resource while creating tools to foster diversity in the classroom with a view to shifting to the International Mindedness ideas while participating in the working group in Den Haag. I shared this resource with colleagues there – but did not share the ideas in my own school setting. While I did discuss the ideas behind this standard and this resource with the Head of Curriculum and Professional Development, the conversation did not really percolate to the teachers that deliver the curriculum in our classes. On reflection, I would have served my colleagues better by sharing this blog post with the experiences and resources during one of our Wednesday morning group sharing times and initiated a collegial dialogue with them in terms of how they saw diversity, cultural understanding, and global awareness – the international mind, in their own classroom context. Responses to this blog would have made it more meaningful to me and could have ring fenced additional strategies that could be tried. This might have given me a more valuable way to looking at developing our faculty in their International Mindedness protocols and “assessing” what that looks like for student learning.