Global Awareness Assignment- Week 6 Post

A) What activity did you select to use for your global assignment?

The activity I selected to use for my global assignment was ePals.  We chose to work with a group of students from Costa Rica, as we are finishing up our Central American sub-unit within the Latin American unit.

B) Describe the activity

The ePals application allows teachers to search the databased on as little to very detailed information.  Teachers can chose what age group, grade level and country they desire.  I would think teachers would be specific, as they are able to tailor where the responses come from and can incorporate that into the lesson as well.  The ePals site allows teachers to find other groups, large enough to accommodate all of their students, so that they all have pen-pals from the same country and class, which I think is a benefit.  The website seemed very secure and very easy to navigate, which again, was another plus for me.

C) Describe how the lesson is considered global awareness

This lesson is considered a global awareness activity because it can allows the students to explore another culture that may have many differences and also similarities.  This activity allows students to explore avenues of other countries that they may never explore in this way again.  As a social studies, specifically right now, geography teacher, we incorporate some kind of global aware daily... typically multiple times a day, but that is the nature of the content.  However, discovering ePals has allowed me to think of other ways to incorporate this into my class, and it is something the students may be able to continue with for a long time, possibly even after the unit is over.  Additionally, the students are going to hopefully have the opportunity to explore content through the eyes of peers, in a different country which can be very different from reading about cultures and exploring them in text, so I am excited to see what the overall outcomes will be.

D) Describe how you incorporate that activity into your classroom

Since we are finishing our sub-until of Central America, and ended with Costa Rica, I chose a group of students in Costa Rica.  As a class, we first discussed proper netiquette when writing an email to a peer that they have never met, created an email account and reviewed what they had learned as a group up until this point.  The students were to use their Costa Rica workbooks, that they constructed in the last few days, as their guide in asking questions to their pen-pals.  Therefore, this ePal experience served my classes more as a review.