Global Awareness Week 6 Shields

For the global awareness assignment, I decided to use www.epals.com. The lesson is a Geography lesson for a first grade classroom, which uses technology to enhance student engagement.

This lesson begins with students gathered on the carpet. Teacher will lead a discussion about their daily lives. They will discuss their food, their clothing, their shelter, their hobbies, and the types of animals that live in their environment. The class will discuss the name of their country and where they live. Then, the teacher will explain to students that they are going to create projects (using previously learned websites like smore, picmonkey, powtoon, and storybird) that show what their country and daily life is like. Teacher will explain that they are going to use the Internet to share their work with kids from different countries that are their same age. Kids from other countries will be doing the same thing. Then the classrooms will connect through epals to share their finished products.

This activity is considered global awareness because it is allowing students from across the globe to connect and learn from one another. All students involved will be learning about the cultures of other countries. My lesson plan explained that ideally my students from the US would be connecting with students from Japan, Italy, France, and Mexico since first graders are aware of these other countries and have some prior knowledge.

This lesson will be incorporated into my classroom during social studies time. The project creation portion of the lesson will take some assistance from the teacher to help with uploading and adding details-this will take place in the computer lab during our weekly Computer Special time. It will even spill over into our writing time, since the post assessment is a journal entry where students will choose their favorite country that they learned about. They will be writing a paragraph about their favorite country with an introduction, 3 details that they learned and a conclusion sentence. Clearly, this lesson will create an interactive, fun learning environment where students are fully engaged in a partnership with classrooms around the globe. It’s sure to enhance Global Awareness!

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Lauren Lucca on June 17, 2014 at 7:50pm

Hi Carly,

I love your lesson plan idea! I don't think really understand that other kids in other cultures have completely different lives than they do. Sometimes I'm not even sure that I understand it all! I think it would be really interesting and beneficial for them to not only think about their lives and represent them in a technological way, but also to see what other cultures are like in other parts of the world. And it definitely would fit into a geography unit in social studies. And then you mentioned that you could even work on their writing in addition to all of that! It sure sounds like a great project to enhance global awareness!

Permalink Reply by Nicole Kaye on June 18, 2014 at 12:58pm

Carly,

As a first grade teacher myself, I feel like there is no way to go wrong when you're incorporating technology in the classroom. We are so busy competing with their home interests of TV, video games, and every other type of electronic device out there. I have noticed my students show the most engagement when they are able to interact in it. I think your students will love showing off their projects on the types of website you included. This sounds like a fun project. Thank you for sharing it, I am already thinking of ways that I can incorporate it into my own classroom.

Permalink Reply by Alvonia Smith on June 18, 2014 at 1:00pm

What a comprehensive lesson! I like how the different subjects intertwine so that the students are not learning in a vacuum. I believe that all subjects are related. Reading is needed to do math, math is needed to do science. Arithmetic is needed to form poetry. Your lesson is consistent with the levels-of-processing approach in that the more connections to a single idea or concept, the more likely it is to be remembered (Huitt, 2003). Your students are getting the foundation that encourages lifelong learning. The more an individual learns the more he can learn and those activities help to implement and strengthen their metacognition. Sadly, geography, zoology, journaling, and social studies were not a part of my first grade experience.

Huitt,W. (2003).The information processing approach to cognition. Educational Psychology Interactive.Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. Retrieved from http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cognition/infoproc.html

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