Standard 4.

3: Diversity & Global Awareness

Standard 4.3 focuses on the importance of educators modeling and facilitating the use of
digital tools and resources to enhance cultural understanding and increase global awareness. I
have chosen 2 artifacts to support my mastery of this standard. The Diversity Blog post from my
Internet Tools class and my English Language Learners (ELL) report. In both of these artifacts, I
detail the ways that educators can model and facilitate the use of digital tools to enhance
cultural understanding.
In the blog post, I give specific resources that educators can use, which I have also used in my
classroom, to enhance global awareness. For example, I have had my students visit the blogs of
American students studying overseas to expose them to the experiences of those students. This
helps enhance their global awareness and acquisition of cultural understanding. I also discuss
the REACH conference and workshops I have attended which also have an emphasis is on
helping educationally or culturally diverse students be comfortable and academically successful
in the classroom. I also discuss being a model for tolerance for my students. There's not as much
focus on educating students who are not exposed to cultures outside of their own to find
tolerance and acceptance. The ELL report details the experience I have had with limited
language learners and how I have used digital tools to enhance their learning experiences and to
address diverse needs of students. Both of these artifacts were solely created by me and I am
responsible for them in their entirety.
From this artifact I learned that there are many resources that general education teachers are not
aware of for ESOL students. Recently, I earned my ESOL endorsement and I have found that
digital tools and resources are really advancing the differentiation possibilities for ESOL
students. I also was able to find more resources for diversity and extending cultural education. If
I could do anything different about this artifact, I would do a better job of sharing these diversity
resources with my faculty. Although I did write the blog article, I can do a better job of sharing to
promote higher usage of these digital tools and facilitate their usage.
School improvement can be judged based on how well the teachers assist in the needs of our
students. By making others aware of the ease of researching ideas and technologies that can be
used by our students with disabilities, as well as our English language learners, I was able to
improve the overall diversity acceptance of the school. One of the challenges in any school
improvement plan is to be able to positively affect the success and performance of our
subgroups, minorities and ESOL students are two of those subgroups. By doing a better job
providing culturally diverse experiences and lessons we help those students to better link new
knowledge to prior experiences. These practices can be assessed by the ACCESS test annually
with our ELL students and by looking at testing data for our subgroups.