Cultural Exchange through Blogging

Last year, a mispelt ning address which brought me to the global education collaborative website set up by Lucy Gray. As it looked interesting and I enjoy being part of global projects, I joined. At the beginning of the USA school year, Lucy sent an email out  to all members, linking us to suggested projects which had been placed on to a shared google sheet. Two of the projects looked interesting for us to be involved in as they involved blogging or working on a shared wiki.

I enrolled my years 9 and 10 students for the cross culture blogging project set up by Dorothy in Texas, and my grade 4 and 5 students for the globalexplorers project. As we are nearing the completion of the former project, I wish to say what an amazing one it was. Four schools were involved – from Wilcox High  (Mr Hurley) in California,  Hawkesdale, Australia; Anderson High School (Mrs Holrah and Mrs Lee) in Texas, USA and Sajik (Sumi Kim) school in Korea.

Learning outcomes have been high, as students not only learnt more about other countries but even more about their own country. Some of the learning outcomes included:-

• how to comment on blogger student blogs
• appropriate comments
• how to translate Korean blogs into English and the challenging task or working out how to add comments back.
• needing to expand and give depth to their posts for a global audience as no Australian cultural knowledge can be assumed. Questions would fly in hard and fast from their global peers trying to tease out more details to their posts.
• Students were engaged. They enjoyed the post prompts and loved checking out the comments that would be there at the beginning of each info tech class.
• when asked, they all indicated by a show of hands that they really enjoyed this project
• receiving a parcel form Sajik School in Korea, with cultural contents, hand made notes and photos was a highlight.
• Learning outcomes have improved as my students were forced to research topics pertaining to their own country and their compare that form students in USA and Korea.