Global Awareness: Project Explorer



As technology integrates our word at a quickening pace, it is becoming more essential to teach students about global awareness in order for them to become successful adults. In order to navigate today's work environment, students will need to be able to learn how to interact with people from other cultures and understand issues that people from other parts of the globe face. Because of this, teachers need to go beyond teaching their students the basic curriculum (reading, writing, math, science, and history) and actually begin to teach students about cultures from all over the globe. However, finding both the preparation time and the instructional time to teach global awareness is difficult, but www.projectexplorer.org is one site that can help teachers (grades 3-12) integrate global awareness into art, ELA, and history. 


ProjectExplorer


If you go to the "student page," all the videos and lessons can be found. You can choose to browse through all the videos on this page, or you can choose to choose the grade level that you teach to help filter some of the materials. Since I work with middle school students, I chose middle school.




After clicking on the link of the grade that you want, you can then choose between either doing a search for videos from the area of the world that you want or you can choose to look through the video series that they have for the students. These series allow students to explore issues and solutions in certain areas, explore wildlife throughout the world, explore food from different cultures, and much more. Teachers can choose to integrate these videos into their lesson plans however they wish.



The best part of this site however is not the collection of videos, but it’s the lesson plans that the site has put together. The main argument against teaching global awareness in the classroom from students, parents, and other educators is likely going to be, "we do not have time for this, why not spend time teaching our students things they will need later in life." Some of those who object might be willing to listen to the "because working with people from other cultures is an important skill" speech. But this site goes beyond learning about other cultures and ties their lesson plans to common core curriculum.


Each Lesson includes objectives, content standards, learning goals, materials needed, and a brief explanation of the lesson itself.















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tech For Admin: Recording and Organizing Behavioral Data

Image
Finding time to gather behavioral data on students can be a tough task for a teacher. Yet, keeping and maintaining data is what allows a teacher to effectively implement their lessons each day for maximum learning. However, gathering data isn’t always done just because it is a good practice, when Individualized Educational Plans come into play, it become a requirement for teachers. Behavioral data collection requires more thought and intentionality to collect that academic data, which can be collected thought assignments or testing. Instead, in order to effectively collect behavioral data, it must be collected throughout the entirety of the class. Some teachers keep clip boards, but the result of that is a new pile of papers that they must keep track of and then when they need to look up data on a specific student, they have to search through multiple sheets of papers to collect it all. Others keep it on their computer, but they may not have access to their computer at the moment,...
Read more

Class Note-Taking

Image
For teachers, hearing the phrase "taking class-notes" takes us back to our college days where we sat in lecture halls, listened to someone give a lecture, and jotted down notes in our notebook (along with a lot of doodles of course, I believe I drew a lot of baseball diamonds with different outfield dimensions). If we were wise, we knew well enough to utilize our notes to study for an upcoming exam or to complete an assignment, but where are these notes today? My guess is that for most of us, they are probably decomposed in some landfill (along with those all-so-important exams and term papers, but that is a topic for another day). So why bring up taking notes for 6th grade students? Because there are benefits to be gained by our students through taking notes. A few of these benefits include:  helping them to organize information helping their brains to process the material making them active in the learning process However, despite the benefits, getting students to ...
Read more