4.3 DIVERSITY, CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING, AND GLOBAL AWARENESS

Candidates model and facilitate the use of digital tools and resources to support diverse student needs, enhance cultural understanding, and increase global awareness.

This artifact is a paper that I wrote while working on my Master's Degree. When I wrote this I was teaching second grade in Dekalb County, and used the specific demographics of that class for my discussion in the paper. The paper discusses different subgroups of students and types of technology that can be used to support each.

This paper demonstrates mastery of standard 4.3: candidates model and facilitate the use of digital tools and resources to support divers student needs, enhance cultural understanding, and increase global awareness. In the paper I discuss how using different technologies can support the diverse needs of different types of students. One of the subgroups I discuss in the paper is bilingual learners. The school I was teaching at when writing this paper was very diverse, and had many students from all over the world. I had students from Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, Honduras, India, the list goes on. Enhancing cultural understanding and increasing global awareness was a part of my instruction everyday. I always took the opportunity to have the students share aspects of their background with the class. We celebrated our cultural differences daily. Part of that was ensuring that I was meeting their learning needs. The section of the paper on bilingual learners discusses the digital tools that I used to meet those needs.

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When writing this paper I realized, even more than I already had, how beautifully diverse that school, and my classroom were. It helped me to gain a deeper appreciation for all of the different cultures that I was able to interact with on a daily basis.  One thing I would like to do to improve this artifact is to add a section regarding the lengths we, at that school, went to to connect with the parents of these students, many who didn't speak any English at all.

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Using the digital resources that I discussed in this paper impacts school improvement and student learning. Ensuring that individual student's needs are being met directly effects his or her ability to learn. And ensuring that all students are learning, and reaching their maximum potential directly effects the overall success of the school. Data from student assessments can measure the impact on student learning, and parent surveys can measure the impact on school improvement.