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.
Reflection

The Engaged Learning Project was created as a culturally responsive online project. In completing the
Engaged Learning Project, I was asked to develop a classroom project that would model and facilitate the
use of digital tools and resources to enhance cultural understanding and increase global awareness. I
developed a lesson for my fifth grade students around a website called My Hero. This site invites
students from around the world to post stories and biographies about their personal heroes. Through
reading the student written biographies, my students were exposed to a variety of cultures from around
the globe and were also able to recognize a personal hero from their own culture. This was an
independent assignment; however, I consulted with my KSU peers to continually improve my ideas as I
developed the project.

Standard 4.3, Cultural Understanding & Global Awareness establishes the expectations for the modeling,
facilitation, and the use of digital tools and resources to support diverse student needs, enhance cultural
understanding and increase global awareness. This artifact demonstrates my ability to facilitate the use of
digital tools to support diverse student needs in the clear lesson plan I devised to implement this project.
Students utilized the My Hero website, Google Docs, Wordles, and video chats to learn, interview, and
share about heroes from around the world. Furthermore, the lesson also includes specific details
addressing the learner description and context, time frame, standards, learner objectives, teaching/learning
process, technology use, and additional rubrics and student documents that will ensure a successful and
meaningful project. My Engaged Learning Project was developed to enhance cultural understanding and
increase global awareness by providing students with many opportunities to read about and discuss heroes
from many cultures using digital tools. In addition, at the conclusion of the project, a Hero Tea is
organized, in which the heroes from my students lives are invited into the classroom to be celebrated.
These heroes, like my students, are diverse in backgrounds and cultures, and allow my students the
opportunities to interact with cultures in which they may not have been previously exposed.
Completing this Engaged Learning Project was a meaningful and positive learning experience. I learned
how to model and facilitate the use of digital tools to integrate a variety of content and technology
standards into a culturally meaningful project. Previous to this project, I had never attempted to create a
project that would raise global awareness to this degree. In the future, I will continue to ask my students
to share their cultures in the projects they complete during the year and I will also continue to integrate
technologies that allow students to gain a more complete awareness of the world.
To future enhance this project in the coming years, I feel it would be beneficial to carry this project
throughout the year, and integrate the heroes on the site into additional instruction to provide students
with even greater exposure to the cultures of the world. For example, when working through a science
unit on conservation, I would like to have my students use the My Hero site to research some heroes in
conservation efforts from around the world. Finally, adding these heroes to a classroom map would
further the students global understanding and the amazing contributions from cultures around the world.
This project benefitted student achievement. Students were able to learn through a culturally relevant,
authentic learning experience. Students were highly engaged and excited about writing. They improved
their skills in writing, and also in effectively using 21
st
Century tools.