Cultural Awareness and Heroes

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:
Virtual collaboration: ePals http://www.epals.com/, Penzu http://penzu.com/
eCommunications Tools: ePals http://www.epals.com/
Creation and Publication Tools: Weebly http://education.weebly.com/
Intel Assessing Projects tool: http://educate.intel.com/en/AssessingProjects

Last modified: Tuesday, May 29, 2012, 2:53 PM