Cultural Diversity - Global Collaboration

Inspired by friend, SMART Exemplary Educator & Google Certified Innovator Danesa Menge from California, USA and her class last year about cultural diversity, where they need a hand from my students with information about Anne Frank I was wanted to do more with this particular topic. With my global citizenship class I decided that they would create a SMART amp workspace for classes from abroad sharing information about our cultural diversity and cultural heritage. On the Global Collaboration G+ Group I made a call for teachers that would like to collaborate with my students. Within a day teachers from South-Korea, Czech Republic, Chile and several parts from the USA responded. Very powerful.
At the time that I'm creating this blog, classes from different parts of the world are adding content about their cultural diversity to the SMART amp workspace and are learning from others. To be continued ...

Seoul, South Korea

Oakdale, CA

Creating Global Learners at #BETT2015

I applied to do a session at the BETT show again about Global Collaboration, which was turned down at first. Later I received an e-mail from the organization that my application was accepted and was due on Wednesday the 21st in the Learn Live Session arena for secondary education. Yes!

I talked to my friend and global collaboration partner and SMART Exemplary Educator Emil Waldhauser that I would like to have him as co-presenter, since he was attending the BETT anyway. He accepted my invite and we created the presentation in Google Drive, in order that we could both contribute to the presentation. Online collaboration indeed. Whilst I'm writing this now, perhaps we should've created our presentation in SMARTamp. Especially since we mentioned that in our presentation a few times and to the fact that our students collaborate online crossing borders in that same online platform SMARTamp.

The presentation was visited by a few people we know, such as my dad, Ainhoa (from SMART Technologies) and a lot of others that showed a lot of interest afterwards and did ask questions to us. I haven't heard any British accent and it's great to have them in the Google+ group for Global Collaboration. The presentation is for sharing and to be viewed by everybody that's interested. Stay in touch!


Video shot by my father and SMART Exemplary Educator Ad Berlijn:

Creating Global Learners III

With my World Citizenship classes we collaborated with the class of SMART Exemplary Educator Emil Waldhauser in Rakovník in the Czech Republic during the first weeks of September. This was meant to be an experiment on how to use SMARTamp workspaces between different countries, instead of within the school or district. I've done a few collaboration projects with Emil before so setting up was easy. We both agree on the fact that todays students should be taught to be so called global learners in order to become a responsible global citizen.
Emil prepared a few questions and shared them in a SMARTamp workspace, so that my students could answer them in small groups. My students were able to sign in, due to the fact that Emil created a school account for my classes to join the class and workspace in the domain of Gymnázium Zikmunda Wintra in Rakovník. Some of my students took this first session very seriously and some didn't. Even though they had fun, collaborated and were really surprised that they could work within one workspace with the Czech students and that they could actually see in real time what our contributions were. Magic.


At the beginning of October I traveled to the Czech Republic with a large group of students to visit Prague and to Rakovník. We payed a visit to Gymnázium Zikmunda Wintra as well, where my students attended a few lessons and of course with teacher Emil Waldhauser. During his class my students were working with an amp session again. During classes I was interviewed by the local press together with the principal of the school and we stated out that both our schools (and personal) really liked working with each other and that we thought that students growing up as global citizens was very important. We agreed on working and collaborating more together ...

World Citizenship

Since a few years I'm teaching this subject in the second class at my secondary school besides geography and economics. There's no standardized curriculum and there are no basic (stated as mandatory by the government) goals with this elective subject. That means that me and my colleagues can pick whatever we think that'll fit within the region of this world citizenship thing. 

During the Global SEE Summit in Calgary I prepared the questions for the twitter chat with Rafranz Davis and the topic was Global Awareness and I guess that covers in my opinion the new subject I teach: World Citizenship (mondo as it's called at my school in the Netherlands). These were the main questions that we asked during the twitter chat: 

- How can we create lessons that better prepare kids to be globally prepared?

- What do you think is most important to teach concerning world citizenship?

- How do we maintain global awareness in learning?

During this twitter chat we tried to get ourselves and other teachers to think about these questions and come up with some answers. Even for us as teachers we need to be an example for our students and therefore it's almost mandatory that we add some global awareness to the curriculum. Wouldn't you agree? Especially with the state of the world at this moment, such as the airplane with civilians shot from the air above Ukraine, ISIS in Iraq, civil war in Syria, conflict between the Israeli and the Palestine people, Russia and it's foreign policy, Global Warming, Ebola virus in Africa, child and slave labour during sports tournaments such as the Olympics and World Championships, natural disasters in China and so on.
Due to the amount of information and access to this information, students get faced with too many different views. In that case it's importend that a trustworthy and reliable person as the teacher is able to help his students to verify and narrow down these information stream, in order to let the student be able to create an opinion of their own.

Global Awareness: people nowadays need to be aware and know at least something about it, to create an opinion of their own on these matters. Since the internet the world is connected and it's not about our own street, city or community anymore. From this point of view I think that we need to get our students globally connected. I know that I will. Not only during this new subject I teach, but also in my standardized curriculum with geography and economics. I've got a few plans to connect my classroom with school classes in New Brunswick-Canada, Novosibirsk-Russia, Rakovnik-Czech Republic, Orland Park/USA and am trying to connect to Kenya-Africa. With the classes that I teach about global citizenship we'll be joining the Global Teenager Project again and will connect with schools in Surinam, Curaçao and hopefully many more. 

This week I was asked if digital citizenship should be part of this world citizenship. I think yes, and will blog about that later this week. And would like if you shared your opinion as well. 

Getting connected with Rafranz Davis from Texas, US.

Association for Citizenship Teaching (UK): http://www.teachingcitizenship.org.uk

Wereldburgerschap - kennisplatform voor mondiaal onderwijs: http://www.wereldburgerschap.nl

Canon voor wereldburgerschap/Canon for Global Citizenship: http://www.ncdo.nl/artikel/canon-voor-wereldburgerschap (UK & NL)