This post is part of C.M Rubin’s monthly series in the Huffington post: The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs. This month we are answering the following prompt: What are the Best Ways for a Teacher to Engage their Classroom in a Global Conversation?
If we are looking to talk about best ways for teachers to support their classroom and hence their students to engage in a global conversation, we need to depart from the assumption that the teacher is globally aware, connected and engaged as a learner themselves.
The teacher needs to be globally aware…
- that global literacy is part of BEING literate today (not a choice or an add-on)
- with the understanding that global awareness entails more than geography skills, the ability to speak more than one language and having traveled abroad for a two week vacation
- of opportunities to participate, contribute and learn from a global conversation
- by strategically building, nurturing, growing and maintaining a Personal Learning Network across the globe
- with the ability to access, “search”, “curate” information and crowdsource their network
- with the mindset and skillset to amplify teaching and learning by reaching out and collaborating with other cultures, people and languages
- by giving as much as they are taking from their connections
- by being flexible, innovative and willing to take risks
- by contributing to the conversations their expertise, perspectives, shareable content and time
- with the understanding that sharing is a moral imperative in a global network of educators and learners
- write and reflect on what matters to them
- have a place to share their learning
- write with a global audience in mind to start, respond and engage a global conversation
- connect, publish, archive, organize, tag, categorize and present their work to an authentic audience
- learn about and experiment with connected digital writing
- be able to reference their work in a global conversation
- build their brand in order to strategically attract future global collaborators
- strategically follow experts of a given field of interest to your students
- curate resources of a specific topic
- engage in a conversation with people from around the world
- use hashtags to following a specific conversation
- participate in Twitter chats to be part of a given topic
- Global Read Aloud
- ePals
- Out of Eden
- 100 People: A World Portrait
- Global Art Project
- Pulitzer Center Projects
- Round Square
- The Flat Classroom Project
- The Global Lives Project
- Visualize Poetry Around The World
- World Wide Schools
- your own relatives, friends and acquaintances, capable of contributing to a rich conversation
- your students’ family from around the world
- previous teacher colleagues
- the friend of a friend of a friend
- amplify by allowing your students to present to an audience beyond the teacher, their classmates, school community or simulated audience
- amplify by video conferencing and bringing in expertise and perspectives from experts, eye -witnesses or peers from other cultures and countries
- amplify by discussing books, writing book reviews, articles, posts, videos, etc. with other people beyond your classroom walls
- amplify by contributing to crowdsourcing requests by others
- amplify by re-thinking writing assignments to be written with an audience in mind, expected to be published, expecting to engage in conversation with others
- amplify by engaging with other topics of interest and commenting on other blogs
- amplify by documenting, curating, sharing and geotagging current news events to invite in different perspectives
- amplify by making learning and thinking visible for others to share best practices and ignite conversations about learning, topics and perspectives
Thanks Silvia – This is exactly the kind of information I was looking for! #Helpful
Bob
Wow! Thanks for putting all this information in one place. As someone who is working on catching up on classroom technology, I really appreciate the step-by-step as this is an intimidating endeavor for me to undertake. As you can see, this is my current level of engagement, but I am committed to learning and bringing new ventures to our classroom. We do look at global issues in our classroom, now it’s to, as you say, amplify our traditional assignments. I have a sixth grade class and I think I should be able to begin incorporating some of these practices. Thank you for sharing these great resources.