Global competence can be broken down into: investigate the world, recognise perspectives, communicate ideas, take action. In their schools they are trying to foster inter-disciplinary learning as life is not compartmentalised. To make a school global there is a need to address this at all levels, global is at the centre of every aspect of practice, particularly project based, inquiry learning and focus on world languages.
Strategies to become more global are: 1) make your pitch for being global 2) overcome reasons for not becoming globally competent 3) make strategic upgrades (opportunities for inquiry, global electives/languages/travel etc.) 4) leverage technology (iEARN, flat classroom, teach unicef etc.) 5) Grow your own global leaders 6) create your own global networks (relationships, resources, resiliency) Two great ideas I took from this are that you need to encourage teachers to have global experiences so they can see the relevance to bring it into their teaching. The second is the idea of a six word story where you can ask students or colleagues to answer using six words which has the benefits of being concise and is a great exit strategy to summarise learning. Here are the links from the session http://www.edweek.org/ew/index.html http://asiasociety.org/files/book-globalcompetence.pdf
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This presentation shared how students can document their language development over time through the use of video blogging. At the beginning of a learning journey, their first post documents their starting point and watching more examples over time demonstrates their language growth and allows them to reflect on their improvement. Additionally, communicating using technology is a 21st century skill that will be developed in many future careers and is an important skill for teachers to support.
To begin planning video blogging it was recommended that you consider the questions of What do students want to share? What are their users (eg: family/friends/link classroom) want to hear about? This can then be matched to the students’ language level to find appropriate topics for a video blog. With students, a good starting point is viewing existing student media in your language to brainstorm topics and styles; seeing other students’ work can capture their imagination and show them how they to can achieve this. Also, students are likely to need basic training with a suitable piece of software if they are not familiar with one and once they are more confident and familiar they can then choose their own techniques and platforms. Upon sharing examples of their video blogs with their peers, they students were often reflective and considered how they could use the techniques or styles they had seen others use, leading to videos that shared the personality of the students and perhaps even some competitive spirit! A final project was something that was more independent, where students had explored their own choice of topic and shared what they have learnt in their final presentation. It was suggested that students can share with other classrooms such as through an iEARN project, giving purpose to their presentations. Top tips that were given were the students can start with unedited clips of audio or video recording, use authentic contexts and situations and search out native speakers for the students to interact with such as at a local restaurant or organisation. Also, see http://www.nsliforyouth.org/ Thank you for sharing, it was a really informative presentation and I look forward to sharing this with my colleagues and soon getting some videos ready to be shared with the world! Thanks GEC 2013, you have shared with great new ideas and motivated me to submit a presentation for next year’s conference!
Sue has found that there is little research in the area of audiobooks during the course of her research as a doctoral student in Australia. She has chosen to study the benefits of audiobooks for elementary students based on observations from her own children who love to listen to audio stories and her experience as a teacher librarian. One of the main benefits she has found is that they increase the students’ vocabulary, which is particularly beneficial to her international student population. Another significant finding is that the students do not like strong accents and have a preference for professional quality narrated recordings, perhaps because they have had the access to recordings completed by a cast with sound effects and relevant, modern stories. It seems that I can take away from this that, if I was to introduce audiobooks to our school, it would involve difficulties with copyright and access to books that can be shared by multiple users and to solve this then perhaps introducing free podcasts that are available to download without restrictions such as from iTunes is a good first step. I look forward to using audiobooks
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AuthorEmma Ahmed is a learning coach and curriculum coordinator at International Schools. Archives
September 2023
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