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Cultural Awareness and Heroes Level: Secondary --- Content: Language Arts and Social Studies |
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Mrs. Sawyer, a
secondary school language arts teacher, initiated a project in the ePals Classroom Exchange environment. The curricular
standard that was to be addressed dealt with writing rich, engaging
biographies. Mrs. Sawyer had heard of a project done on the iEarn network that integrated biographical writing with
the 21st Century Skills of global and cultural awareness and decided to
emulate that project in the ePals environment. The
essential question that was to be addressed was “How do society and culture
influence our lives?” In order to address this question, through ePals, Mrs. Sawyer enlisted secondary classrooms from
five nations around the world. Students in each of the classrooms were asked
to write to the following prompt: “Choose a person in
your family, living or dead, who has characteristics that you would consider
to be heroic. Heroism can be on a large scale, or it can be played out within
family or personal relationships. Write a biography of that person, which
links elements of the society and culture within which that person developed,
with the heroic characteristics that caused you to select her or him. The
biography should both impart the story of the person as hero and provide
insights into the culture and society that bred those heroic traits.” In her own classroom,
Mrs. Sawyer’s students worked in small groups using the Web 2.0 tool Penzu to provide feedback and peer-editing services. When
the essays were completed, students from all six nations posted the finished
biographies on a private Web site created using the educational version of
Weebly.com. As part of the evaluation, student groups evaluated their own
biographies as well as those of others in their groups. They used peer review
checklists that the teacher created using the Intel Assessing Projects tool.
In addition, Mrs. Sawyer’s students were asked to review the submissions of
each of the nations and create a cultural or societal profile that gleaned
common, positive characteristics of that society from the essays. Each
student would write a summary of these profiles and the writing and level of
insight of individual students would be included in the assessment of each.
Through ePals, these profiles were shared with
classrooms in participating nations. Tools used in this
scenario: |