Initiatives, curriculum, and/or activities at your school or organization?

[Lucy Gray]

What are some things that are currently going on where you work to insure kids grow up with a sense of the world around them? Let's start this discussion by informally listing what is in existence.

[Andrea Bittle]

My fifth-graders just finished a wonderful global awareness project. Based on the book by David J. Smith, "If the World Were a Village," they created graphs, summarized data, and then we created a wiki. Here, they created pages about various topics such as population, religions, pollution, access to clean air and water, nationalities, and languages. As the project progressed, we added more components. They completed a "carbon footprint" activity, read about students in other countries through the Peace Corps site, "Kids around the world." They also viewed media, read related articles, and searched in newspapers and magazines for articles related to their studies. It was fabulous!

[Kelly Korenak]

Is your wiki public so teachers can see what kind of graphs and projects your students created, or is it just a private class wiki?

I know of a teacher who did a much simpler, one or two day version of the project you describe. She shared the David Smith book with the kids, and they couldn't believe some of the stats in there. So she said, "Well, let's prove him wrong!". So they dug up statistics and recreated the math and broke down the proportions, and found out he was right.

This is a great idea - - I frequently hear math teachers say it's too hard to connect global issues to math, but what a great real-world, and interesting, way to reinforce math skills. Kudos!

[Sarah McPherson]

I had a project with educators from several countries to increase their connections with other educators around the world, Global Connections 2008 We want teachers to know of other teachers in other countries and to share their knowledge of others with their own students, or better yet, get their students in touch with others. This hasn't happened yet.

Some participation were assignments in our classes in New York and Taipei. I think the book study described in Andrea's response would work well. The language barrier is a major difficulty however. Therefore our colleagues in Taiwan asked for us to focus visual communication. This worked OK but not with 100% success. We are looking for more ideas. Any suggestions?

[Kay McNulty]

Our middle school resides in a small urban setting in New Jersey. For some global collaborative activity, I have been trying to create awareness for the melting pot community right within the school walls. The students mapped some origins of the people they see every day (but not necessarily within classrooms) - cafeteria workers, custodians, maintenance crew - all have stories that enrich student awareness of how diverse our school community is. The individuals so far represent Greece, Dominican Republic, Peru, Italy, China, and Korea. This fall, a digital stories project will be our next step., along with some student pairing with the group to assist with establishing communication links to families or other students in the home countries. Perhaps it will all lead to some group discussions or project exchanges. We may eventually expand the project to several other schools in the district.