ISTE Coaching Standard 5: Digital Citizenship Indicator 5c

Model and promote diversity, cultural understanding, and global awareness by using digital age communication and collaboration tools to interact locally and globally with students, peers, parents, and the larger community

ISTE Coaching Standards (2014)

Resonant Ideas: Cultural understanding & global collaboration

Technology is perhaps most powerful in the classroom when it can help students explore ways of thinking or living that are different from their own. Books and movies have always done this but are a one-way street. Digital tools offer what they do plus the ability to communicate with people from different cultures or parts of the world in real time. They allow, as I cover in my post Global Collaborator, a way to go beyond stereotypes and shallow understanding to interact with the real thing. Global collaboration instills “intelligent humility” or the realization that our knowledge is based on our experience and our experience is limited. The world is much more complex than we perceive (Liebtag et al., 2016).

When I worked on the “Global Collaborator” post, I wondered why more teachers don’t try to connect with distant classrooms or experts given that very little technology is required. My research uncovered a number of factors that affected a teacher’s interest and confidence, including their organization’s attitude toward risk taking, connection with a global professional learning network, and experience with teleconferencing. (This last item gives me hope that teachers will be much more willing to try distant collaboration after their experience this year with remote teaching.)

Coaches can help teachers become aware of the possibilities of global collaboration by providing them with examples for their grade level, helping them the first time they meet virtually with an expert or distant classroom, and trying to promote an openness toward these types of experiences at the school and district level. I hope that by working on virtual field trips with a second grade teacher as I describe in Digital Age Learning Environments Indicator 3G, that she will now have the confidence to try these on her own and share her knowledge at her school. 

Indicator 5c also refers to cultural understanding, and as I cover in my post Technology and Culturally Responsive Teaching, eighty percent of elementary and secondary teachers in the U.S. are white, while a majority of the students they teach are not. This points to the need for teachers to use any tools they can to better understand and reach students who have grown up in cultures different from their own. In this post I describe digital tools and methods that support students who come from more collectivist (vs. individualist) cultures or cultures rich in oral tradition. 

Indicator 5c calls on coaches to be the catalyst for using technology to support cultural differentiation and connection with students, teachers, and experts on the other side of the city, country, or world.

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