Diversity, Cultural Understanding and Global Awareness

It is very important to teach our learners to appreciate various cultures, diversity and to be globally aware. I use Twitter daily as a form or ongoing professional learning for myself. I follow a very diverse group and through it have connections to many regions throughout the United States because of it. I taught and am now the technology integration coach at for my current district. The society we live in today it is vital for our learners to be globally aware as well as being aware of other cultures. The Vision for my school district is "Our students are lifelong learners who use their knowledge, skills, and influence to make the world a better place." As you can see it is a part of our everyday interactions in a project-based learning environment that we teach and model these things for our learners. We are always seeking out real-world opportunities for our learners. We want them to solve problems for a real world audience.


Our learners are 1:1 in grades three through nine (3rd iPads and 4th-9th Macbooks) so it is very easy to integrate collaboration tools into the classroom. Kindergarten through second grades have a certain number of iPads per classroom. A took and activity that my learners enjoy are Mystery Skype sessions. I use Twitter and my Professional Learning Network to locate other classrooms that want to Mystery Skype with us. We are a Google Apps for Education School and find that other schools that we "meet with" are actually use Google Hangouts. We have also done this with leaders or people within a company that we were interested in learning more about or trying to help them solve a "real world problem". Also, being a Google Apps School the learners love to use G-Suite to collaborate with each other. We are also a no textbook school so we work hard and close with learners in determining quality resources to learn as well as enhance their learning.


Parents and others are shown what all our learners are doing at school through a digital communication known as a SMORE. There are biweekly editions that go out per learning community. There is also a school-wide edition that goes out once a month. The community editions are sent to parents and posted on social media for a larger audience to be able to see what learners are doing. The community editions contain photos and things going on within the community (projects, activities, etc) as well as what standards are being covered through the projects. It also contains important information and dates. Learners attend Chinese classes taught through the Confucious Institute at Troy University here in Montgomery. Learners, kindergarten through ninth grade, either go daily for eight weeks or once a week for the entire school year.


We use "Fishbowls" to give feedback and reflect. We usually do two fishbowls at one time the larger outer bowl being the backchannel with something such as Today's Meet going making comments, questions and advice while only listening to the inner circle share. We did this with both parents and learners in different settings. The one with parents was to gauge how they felt things were going for our school since we are only in the second year of it being in existence. We used it with learners to reflect on their experiences as a learner in a project-based setting.