Courtney Carver

Date Submitted: June 26, 2017

Version Submitted: v1

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 evidence presented for this standard is my blog post titled Podcasting, Visual Learning
Tools, and Diversity, which I completed in ITEC 7430. The blog was written based on my
research on using technology to meet the needs of diverse learners in the classroom. In the blog
post I discuss how teachers can use technology to break down the cultural walls of their
classroom to expose their students to global awareness. This was an individual assignment.

Standard 4.3, Diversity, Cultural Understanding, and Global Awareness established the
expectation that I model and facilitate the use of digital tools and resources to support diverse
student needs, enhance cultural understanding, and increase global awareness. In my blog
posting I discuss the use of digital tools and resources to support diverse student needs.
Teachers can use the Internet to expose their entire class to cultural differences by showing
videos, blogging with students from other countries, and having students do research related to
other parts of the world. By using visual learning tools in my classroom, such as VoiceThread, I
was able to model and facilitate the use of digital tools to support diverse student needs. I
was also about to use tools such as Xoom with various teachers in my building this year to speak
with students from around the country on various topics from reading to engineering. Allowing
students the opportunity to speak with students from other regions and cultures helped to
enhance their cultural understanding and increase global awareness. By using these digital
tools and resources that I wrote about in my blog post, teachers can help students widen their
perspective and be open-minded, global citizens of society.

Completing this assignment allowed me the opportunity to widen my own global perspective and
be reflective on how I approach global awareness in my own classroom. I found that there are a
wealth of digital tools and resources to help me grow both personally and professionally when it
comes to supporting the diverse needs of my students. In the future, I would like to offer some
professional development on this topic to my faculty. My current school has a very diverse
student population, and a homogenous teacher population. I believe that some PL on diversity
and cultural awareness would prove to be very enlightening for my faculty and staff.

The work that took place in this assignment directly impacted my personal development and
student learning. This blog posting forced me to be reflective of my own teaching practice, and I
was able to take what I learned from this assignment to directly impact my daily teaching. The
impact can be assessed with student perception surveys, and well as faculty perception surveys
as this message of diversity and cultural awareness is shared with the faculty and staff.