Social Bookmarking is a great way to share cool and helpful websites, let me show you what I've learned:
National Archives: This is a great site with online museum exhibits; I viewed the World War II Propaganda and Poster exhibit. This site is an extremely useful tool for showing students information and examples of what they are learning without leaving the classroom.
National Education Association: Focuses on helping teachers become culturally competent. Some of their suggestions I find most helpful include:
Network with parent, family, minority community, and faith-based organizations concerned with the needs of diverse students. Solicit their involvement and input in the design and implementation of initiatives for culturally, linguistically, racially, and ethnically diverse groups. This is a great suggestion because it doesn’t cost anything and it is hearing directly from the people whose opinions matter most.
Identify and include budgetary expenditures each fiscal year to facilitate personnel development through their participation in conferences, workshops, and seminars on cultural competence. Even if a district does not have enough money to send multiple teachers to multicultural conferences and workshops, have the teachers that do attend come back and present to the rest of the staff.
Gather and organize resource materials related to culturally diverse groups for use by school staff. Have a library of resources on these issues, that way there is no excuse for not finding this important information.
Kids Click: I focused on the vocabulary section of this site, which has safe links for kids to sites that host “word of the day” or “jargon of the day”. I think this would be a good daily activity for kids to learn word definitions.
Kathy Shrock’s Guide for Educators: This site has a great anagram finder that would be fun for students to experiment with. It may be a useful tool for remembering vocabulary words and possibly for spelling.
Edutopia Website: This site details the different ways that people learn. For example, I am definitely of a Linguistic intelligence, which means that I identify more with strong linguistic intelligence often love to read, play with words, write, do crossword puzzles, and invent word games. I am definitely NOT of Logical-mathematical intelligence, meaning I’m dreadful at math, computer programming, logic puzzles, and problem solving.
Teaching Tolerance: The lesson plan activity that I looked at involved using student’s imaginations to journal the experience of Lewis and Clark’s expedition. Students would read actual jourbal entries from the trip to imagine the experience of women, like Sacagawea, and a servant named York.
Multicultural Awareness and Equity Quiz: The 2 questions I found to be most interesting were the crack vs. powder cocaine question, and the amount of teachers of color on staff, or lack there of. It seems suspicious that 00 grams of powder cocaine qualifies you for a felony, as does only 5 grams of crack cocaine. Because both drugs are in the same category, it seems that the offending amount should be closer. I was also surprised to learn that 40% of schools have no teachers of color on staff. This is such a high percentage, but I can see how this would be possible in many schools in the mid-west or states like Idaho and Wyoming, which have small African-American populations.
Netiquette: I scored an 80% on the netiquette quiz, which I thought was pretty good considering I don’t go to chat rooms. Netiquette is important to teach students, because it’s often difficult to read people or the content of what they are trying to say through email or web-based communication. It is easy to detect sarcasm in someone’s voice if their tone or facial expression changes. But sarcasm can be interpreted as simply being rude if not carefully written into an email or chat. For example an emoticon such as ;-) the wink may let someone know your being funny.
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