“Examination of social and cultural implications of educational technologies, considering issues of cultural bias, equity, and questions of who benefits from particular technologies. International applications of computer technologies to promote learning about different cultures.”
Artifacts
Kindred: Global Learning Network Project
My final project for ETEC-525 was to work with a elementary school teacher and help establish communications with a partner school from across the world. We found the project on the iEarn website and chose the Kindred project, because it was close enough to a heritage lesson that the 4th/5th grade class had to do. For the Project the students had to interview their parents or grandparents and ask them about a hardship that they had to overcome. The students needed to write down this interview and after editing, post it on the iEarn website in the Kindred forum. We had students from Atlanta, GA, Belarus, Ukraine, and Australia participate. We found that the project was extremely successful because the students were able to use computers for communication, something that they had never done before. The students were also excited about the prospect of communication with students from across the globe. It was exciting to see the students read the interviews from the partner school and discover that their families had similar hardships and that they all had sim linguistical ilar experiences. For me it was also motivating that students that age could communicate with others and notice the cultural and differences that were carried across due to the different English words that the other students used. During one of the essays one of the Australian students used to word “Mum” which I instantly noticed that the California students would probably not be able to figure out initially, and indeed they were asking among themselves to figure it out. I opted not to give them the answer and decided to wait and see how long it would take one of them to figure out the meaning out of the context of the story, which it didn’t take more than a few minutes. This would be a great project to conduct even at the college level with a partner school of the language being learned.
Unfortunately the I’m unable to show the video we made for the presentation, since many of the parents never returned the Photo/Video release forms.
Reflection
While the class didn’t have us really learn or practice any new technology. We did cover social aspects and cultural concerns and inequalities that currently exist with the use of technology. Many of the articles that we read were dated even though they were recently published. We found that even the articles that were published in the early 2000s had often used research that had occurred in the mid 90s, which when dealing with technology is quite antiquated by the time we got to reading the articles. I still though thought the class was useful, especially since for the final project I had the ability to work with a grade school teacher and we setup an exchange with schools from across the globe. It was interesting to see how my partner’s students reacted and interacted with other students from across the globe.