Diversity, Cultural Understanding, and Global Awareness

In this day and age, I feel that there are several ways that a teacher can model and promote diversity, cultural understanding, and global awareness by using digital-age communication and collaboration tools to interact locally and globally with students, peers, parents, and the larger community. Throughout the blog posts that I have submitted, I have reflected back on some tools that I have studied that goes along with this particular post.

The first program/app that I feel would promote/model diversity, cultural understanding and global awareness is Nearpod. Nearpod is an interactive classroom tool for teachers that engage students with interactive lessons. I created a Nearpod lesson that taught students the history behind music that had a political message. The culture during the time that these songs were written was very different, and sharing a lesson on that topic promotes that.

Newsela is another tool that I learned about in this course. Newsela is a data base that includes various articles related to current events. There are many different themes included such as: Arts, Science, Health, Law, etc. A teacher can create a profile and add their students to the class. After this is done, they can assign articles for their students to read and take quizzes or submit a writing prompt. The reading level of the article can also be adjusted. Newslea, in my opinion, definitely promotes cultural understanding and global awareness.

VGo is also a great tool that promotes diversity. VGo is a tool that helps a person to replicate themselves in another location. This tool give the person the ability to move around as if they were physically there. An individual can see, hear, talk, go anywhere and interact. VGo is great for students that cannot physically go to school because of an illness, accident or medical condition.

Another program/app that can model diversity, cultural understand and global awareness is Seesaw. This app is a platform for student engagement. Teachers can upload photos, videos, drawings, text, PDFs, and links. Seesaw engages students, improves the quality of their work and teaches students key skills. Seesaw promotes 21st Century skills, and this is helping students to thrive in today's world.

I am sure there are many other apps and programs out there that can promote and model diversity, cultural understanding and global awareness. I am not a teacher presently. However, I do plan on using the tools that I have learned about in my future classroom!