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. (PSC 4.3/ISTE 5c)
ITEC 7305
Unstructured Field Experience
Design Learner portfolio
Our International Baccalaureate program at Norcross High School has responded to changes in the IB curriculum over the past three years. This year, the English literature curriculum changed, and it demanded a new approach to student accountability and demonstration of learning. The students need to put together individual portfolios of their thinking and learning which includes responses to two years’ worth of learning in English A. So, as the curriculum lead for IB English, I decided to develop a digital learner’s portfolio that would record the development of thinking over two years and which would enhance cultural understanding and global awareness as students studied the 24-26 pieces of literature throughout their coursework.
I decided to use a digital tool for the students’ portfolios. Google Sites provides the functionality we need while also keeping students’ identities safe within our org unit. First, I decided to make a model site for students to use as a template for their study. Although the goal of the portfolio is to track students progress through reflection, it is necessary for teachers to be able to look at the portfolios and assess their students’ progress, even informally. I designed the website with tabs featuring our Global Issues such as Justice, Respect, Available resources, and I oriented the reflection pages within to invite students to address those issues with themes they found in their literature. I set up the site not by work of literature but by the global issues that students find in each work so that their reflections would be oriented more toward the thinking about the literature than the literature itself. A website’s internal navigation features are perfect for suggesting a hierarchy of importance to ideas, and in IB, global awareness is of primary importance in our study.
Then, even though the website template suggests an organizational structure that is necessary for six IB teachers and over 300 students to communicate effectively as they move through two years of study, the design and type of content is left to the student’s own creative approach. The student may play with the themes of the site in order to meet the overall focus for his or her reflections and to better visually convey the message she or she wishes to highlight. Connections are built within the portfolio, namely, readers, writers, and text and time and space. So, the students are encouraged to use the capability of Google Sites to embed audio, video, text, image and whatever else they can think of to connect their learning to global issues, current or past. We have students who language skills are still growing, even though they are participating well in the highest level of coursework at our school. Therefore, the digital tools allows for students to communicate in their own language when reflecting. They are encouraged to use videos and texts in their native languages as they reflect upon their learning in English. Further, using Google Sites allows other accessibility for students who need it. We are encouraging for some the use of screen readers for texts they mustenbed from the learning. But the best accessibility features of the tools is that Google sites is shareable, and so the students form cohorts to evaluate one another’s portfolios as they go along in the study. Students can also use whatever media they choose to reflect on their learning.
In completing this artifact, I learned that designing a template for students to use safely across two years of learning is difficult. There must be a balance between ultimate digital functionality which is engaging to the student, and the safety that must be considered when using a third-party app outside of the district’s org unit. In fact, our district prohibits many third-party apps outside our Google Suite for Education.This is frustrating since it’s natural to want to give students access to the coolest tools for portfolio making. However, student identity safety is also an important consideration for teachers, as the students could easily compromise their own safety without knowing it if they were to share using their personal accounts on a third party app. Last, I learned how to transfer student work to allow them intellectual property rights at the end of the coursework. IB requires us to retain the student work two years after graduation. A digital platform absolutely makes that easier, but the students also have a right to what they created. It isn’t easy to grant the access to their .org created portfolios after graduation. Working with our media center specialist who is trained in the Google Suite of products, I was able to work a solution to granting access to the portfolio for copy before the Seniors graduate.
Overall the portfolio will help students to take ownership over the learning that they are doing. The IB curriculum invites students reflection over their own learning, and so this website will enable students to draw on their learning to make conclusions about the global issues the IB presents them with. Also, it’s easy for students to see individual works of literature as single points of demonstration rather than connected by theme of issue, so the portfolio will enable students to more faithfully participate in the intent of the IB, which is to increase global awareness through the study of literature.
Unstructured Field Experience
Design Learner portfolio
Our International Baccalaureate program at Norcross High School has responded to changes in the IB curriculum over the past three years. This year, the English literature curriculum changed, and it demanded a new approach to student accountability and demonstration of learning. The students need to put together individual portfolios of their thinking and learning which includes responses to two years’ worth of learning in English A. So, as the curriculum lead for IB English, I decided to develop a digital learner’s portfolio that would record the development of thinking over two years and which would enhance cultural understanding and global awareness as students studied the 24-26 pieces of literature throughout their coursework.
I decided to use a digital tool for the students’ portfolios. Google Sites provides the functionality we need while also keeping students’ identities safe within our org unit. First, I decided to make a model site for students to use as a template for their study. Although the goal of the portfolio is to track students progress through reflection, it is necessary for teachers to be able to look at the portfolios and assess their students’ progress, even informally. I designed the website with tabs featuring our Global Issues such as Justice, Respect, Available resources, and I oriented the reflection pages within to invite students to address those issues with themes they found in their literature. I set up the site not by work of literature but by the global issues that students find in each work so that their reflections would be oriented more toward the thinking about the literature than the literature itself. A website’s internal navigation features are perfect for suggesting a hierarchy of importance to ideas, and in IB, global awareness is of primary importance in our study.
Then, even though the website template suggests an organizational structure that is necessary for six IB teachers and over 300 students to communicate effectively as they move through two years of study, the design and type of content is left to the student’s own creative approach. The student may play with the themes of the site in order to meet the overall focus for his or her reflections and to better visually convey the message she or she wishes to highlight. Connections are built within the portfolio, namely, readers, writers, and text and time and space. So, the students are encouraged to use the capability of Google Sites to embed audio, video, text, image and whatever else they can think of to connect their learning to global issues, current or past. We have students who language skills are still growing, even though they are participating well in the highest level of coursework at our school. Therefore, the digital tools allows for students to communicate in their own language when reflecting. They are encouraged to use videos and texts in their native languages as they reflect upon their learning in English. Further, using Google Sites allows other accessibility for students who need it. We are encouraging for some the use of screen readers for texts they mustenbed from the learning. But the best accessibility features of the tools is that Google sites is shareable, and so the students form cohorts to evaluate one another’s portfolios as they go along in the study. Students can also use whatever media they choose to reflect on their learning.
In completing this artifact, I learned that designing a template for students to use safely across two years of learning is difficult. There must be a balance between ultimate digital functionality which is engaging to the student, and the safety that must be considered when using a third-party app outside of the district’s org unit. In fact, our district prohibits many third-party apps outside our Google Suite for Education.This is frustrating since it’s natural to want to give students access to the coolest tools for portfolio making. However, student identity safety is also an important consideration for teachers, as the students could easily compromise their own safety without knowing it if they were to share using their personal accounts on a third party app. Last, I learned how to transfer student work to allow them intellectual property rights at the end of the coursework. IB requires us to retain the student work two years after graduation. A digital platform absolutely makes that easier, but the students also have a right to what they created. It isn’t easy to grant the access to their .org created portfolios after graduation. Working with our media center specialist who is trained in the Google Suite of products, I was able to work a solution to granting access to the portfolio for copy before the Seniors graduate.
Overall the portfolio will help students to take ownership over the learning that they are doing. The IB curriculum invites students reflection over their own learning, and so this website will enable students to draw on their learning to make conclusions about the global issues the IB presents them with. Also, it’s easy for students to see individual works of literature as single points of demonstration rather than connected by theme of issue, so the portfolio will enable students to more faithfully participate in the intent of the IB, which is to increase global awareness through the study of literature.