In the great world of technology we live in, everyday products are being created that can be implemented into a classroom setting to improve our abilities as teachers to fully give our students a real-world or global collaboration experience without leaving our building. The new creation that would contribute to successful global collaboration in the classroom that I found exceptional was Virtual And Augmented Reality using a platform called Google Expeditions. This application gives students and teachers the power to go anywhere they want virtually, meaning all you would need is an electronic device & depending on the scenario, a headset or classroom with lights off. This also comes with an evaluation on whether your students can handle this depending on age or if any special exceptions are needed due to health or personal needs. As a future teacher, I see this new wave of learning truly getting a step in global collaboration success! 

The program Google Expeditions was kicked off in September 2015, with over 500 FREE explorations each having its own broken down subcategories for pit stops along the adventure. These stops include several panoramic scenes, curriculum connections, notes, and discussion questions to supplement the curriculum. All ranging from memorials to museums to other countries and everyday scenes in the United States of America, which in my opinion is truly fantastic. This truly gives students the opportunity to work with their peers around the world, setting them up to engage in other places outside of their everyday settings. For teachers, this program is set up in the most user-friendly way possible by having spreadsheets with all expeditions, questions, and information, and on top of it in the user page on the website, it even has teacher training slides which give teachers all the necessary information to excel with this platform. In conclusion, this program would be a perfect tool to use in global collaboration in classrooms. 

In my walk out of Eden journeys, there were a lot to be taken in, so many different landforms, people, objects, and feelings to be had. On my first adventure, I did the silk road chapter 4. This one truly spoke out to me considering the length of travel the journey was, along with all the different scenery. Ranging from the cargo ships to the Deseret and everything in between. Along the way, there was lots of history that were passed such as in the tomb that was passed where the rock/clay was carved into by a horseman. During the travel, the people that were seen were truly remarkable such as the Afgan cobbler that made pauls packhorse a harness.  In the Airakty mountains, Kazakhstan they got to harvest steppe (milk protein) from camels. In Uzbekistan, there was a 300 dollar mastiff for sale at a roadside market. But strangely enough during the journey, the point of not seeing women were trending up until mile 4300. The silk road is seriously one of the most interesting and complex pathways for centuries. 

On my next journey The Riverlands,  the first stop was northern Pakistan where they watched families follow the rivers in the glacial valets of Karakoram, follow the water in order to find pockets of gold from the river bed, children, women, and families try to get as much as they can in order to live. A good day for them is a tiny nugget that is worth $40. Sadly the next stop I made was in Punjab, India, where my eyes were opened to the use of drug abuse by teens to numb the pain of everyday living. Most people want to escape their living situation and find something better due to such poor lifestyles and conditions.  The next stop is Gwalior India, where the crime rate is so high the police put up wanted signs and will pay for weddings or medical bills if bandits are brought to justice. It is deeply saddening to see so much poverty and rough life in our world. 

Lastly, Chapter 6/ Middle kingdoms, takes place is china focusing on all the history. My first stop was the Gaoligong Mountains, taking place near an old silk road trading town. These mountains are crammed with over 700 animal species, ranging from mammals to amphibians and everything in between. The rain that occurred would practically flood our cities, monsoon rains are an understatement. The landscape throughout this part of the journey did not vary much, very desolate, valleys and mountains. This piggybacks the fact of low populations, but insane amounts of animal life. The people they did see were definitely were interesting, for example, Yang a 74-year-old man who is a herbalist and hand rolls his own products. It truly is remarkable how other people live in such different scenarios than we occur in the US every day. 

In the information that was informed of the website www.we.org in the WE-teachers section, I was thoroughly surprised at what was available to help my future classroom.  The information that I found most interesting and useful for my future classroom would be the module on Youth Violence Module. I found this information to stand out more than the rest due to its in-depth situations and how to handle them. The module went through how to handle situations, what to look out for, how to justify what you are doing and what courses of action should be taken. Such as how to make the student feel, what sources to reach out to in order to get the student adequately handled. The facts and statistics of the Youth violence situation are truly remarkable and quite honestly saddening. It would be useful to me in my future classroom because Youth Violence is something that truly bothers me within and  I do not stand for it, I do not want that brought into my teaching environment. 

A HyperDoc is an interactive Google Doc or Slide Deck that replaces traditional “teacher in the front, worksheet on desk” learning and puts it in the hands of the student! Hyperdocs are digital lesson plans given to students by the teacher. Hyperdocs make the students apply their learning using the 4 C’s method. The 4 C’s stand for critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. Hyperdocs are digital lesson plans and are specifically designed to create a student-faced blending learning experience. One thing that I found was How to Teach Remotely with a Google Slides Hyperdoc. Designing google slides remotely with Hyperdocs engages students when they are learning asynchronously. This will also help deliver project-based learning as well. Hilton Highfill applied a pedagogical approach to this learning that included 5 methods as engage explore evaluate explain and elaborate. Also known as the 5 E’s. The most important piece to this lesson is having students apply what they learned in authentic creative meaningful ways. In order for the students to understand I would create a slide with every method of the 5 E’s explaining what they mean and what they are all about to help my students.

Francesca Stahl

The Virtual field trip that i decided to take was the Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo Japan. This interested me because I want to travel in the future and often ponder what other places far from the USA look like in a daily setting to compare and contrast. After taking this virtual field trip I noticed this crossing and landscape is very similar to Times Square in New York City. I say this because there are lots of people crossing streets, lots of people commuting, And the laughter of those taking in the views or conversing. The one thing that I did find interesting was, there were not a lot of cars and those that did cross paths were not the newest or best looking. The cabs were all black or green that must have been over 20 years old. The regular people were driving more compact older SUVs or small cars. The laughter and commentary reminded me a lot of home. The buildings had similar infrastructure and designs to them. Lots of Billboards with moving pictures & background music or wording. In my eyes, there was so much to take in along with similarities & most definitely differences. It was a really cool and interesting virtual experience. I think that one item I can take away from this is even though people and culture are different, a lot of the roots & fundamentals of life are similar in the simplest of ways. 

https://www.360cities.net/video/shibuyacrossing-8k360vr-mp4

In my show that I observed in regards to subtitles & cultural differences, I watched “ The Pit” (Çukur). The show was about a Turkish mob family who is about to lose control of their territory. The culture overseas where the show was created had large differences but also similarities to culture back in the states. One thing that was significantly different would be the landscape and areas where everything took place. The buildings were all concrete, all very close to each other, and no roads were paved just pavers/brick. All of the vehicles were small passenger vehicles that were standard transmissions. In contrast to our culture. Most of our buildings are multi-construction buildings using different materials, Our vehicles range in size from larger SUVs all the way to two-door coupes that are usually automatic transmission. The social cues that differed were everyone in the show had a very uptight attitude and was not willing to lend a hand to those in need. The main characters held a serious more stone-faced personality just wanting to get their business taken care of no matter what they had to accomplish. Most people in the show traveled along the short sidewalks that were crowded with carts or food stands. The setting was more of a colder environment with not a lot of natural light. The foods that were served consisted of danishes, fruits, and smaller glasses of tea/coffee. In our culture, there is more of an array of different types of food that are served and enjoyed eating schedules that are different from the ones portrayed in the show. For the most part, the characters shared a common character value of family and taking care of business much as we do in our culture in my opinion. The economic situation that was shown was to be on the poorer side and the government heavily controlled the public. If you were not mob-related or had significant money to assist your say in the government pestering you then therefore you were living in poverty and dictatorship. The culture that we have, the government is not very similar to that dictatorship, and class does not depend on what you do in your daily life. In conclusion, the tv show differed much more than our own culture in many significant ways. 

In this week’s reading of “Sail the 7 c’s With Microsoft education” Chapter 2 Communication, there were lots of different tools that are offered by Microsoft that I personally found very useful as an educator and that I learned a lot about each individual one. The tool that I learned the most about and piqued my interest would be Microsoft’s Immersive Reader tool, this tool was originally an Add-on feature to Microsoft’s applications now it is embedded into almost every program that Microsoft offers.  This tool allows users like myself to truly adjust and accommodate the information that is trying to be viewed into something that is suitable for their issues with reading. I learned that I  can adjust or enable the following: Text size, spacing, font, highlighting tool, line focus feature, picture dictionary, and translate any word or document into over 60 different languages. The Immersive reader tool is something that I didn’t know existed and now I have used it multiple times in different applications within my own personal schooling and life. It is very impressive to have such a well-functioning tool that can help me adjust my information into something that fits my specific needs and accommodations. The information that I am trying to interpret is now in a comfortable font, highlightable, and can be sorted in any way that I feel is truly efficient for my uses. On top of all the amazing factors I have learned about from using this program, it is completely free to use. In my opinion, this tool is an all-around win-win, extremely versatile and completely free! From a technical standpoint this tool would assist so many students who struggle with reading comprehension and feeling comfortable with accessing information efficiently. 

` In the world of education, there are multiple factors that contribute to being a successful educator, one of those would be goal setting. In my opinion, I believe that Sustainable Global Education/ goals are a huge goal that should be followed by any educator no matter what environment you are in. One of these goals that are very important would be ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all not only as educators but also to cast onto our students and influence their own lives going forward. To further explain that, education should never stop trying to improve itself, therefore always expanding and creating new options to further educate those students to come. One way to do this is to generate and move further in all levels of education to grow towards a more efficient form of education without hurting any of our resources. In the sense of being efficient to our community, natural resources, and fellow colleagues. In order to fully fulfill this task, we would need to get better institutions for education, brighten up campuses, and support showing our students how to properly complete this task going forward. There are now associates like GAP (Global Action Programme), HESI (Higher Education Sustainability Initiative), and many more that will develop sustainability plans in partnership to further contribute. 

 The classroom lately has been taken over by virtual impacts in every aspect possible, for the web tool that I find most useful for the classroom would be, Discovery Education’s “Virtual Field trips” Interactive tool. I say this because students nowadays need to be engaged in the classroom whether it’s engagement in videos, interactive websites, and or music. The tool that I think is most useful in the classroom takes field trips or educational information and puts a spin on it, no need for permission slips or coordinating busses with chaperones!!  This free tool lets you pick from multiple different subject fields. Some examples are Health & Wellness, Tech/manufacturing, and agriculture. No matter what subject you’re trying to engage your students in, the virtual field trip will help peak those interests. Each individual field trip is sponsored by a larger company, therefore, backing the high video quality, precise information, and valid factual representation of the lesson. What I really like about this program is that you aren’t obligated to pay for a subscription account or get tangled in lengthy research. Videos ranging from 8-40 minutes, with some videos having built-in blocked segments meaning you can pick the most educational section and not have to over-exaggerate the point of the virtual field trip. The applications for this program are truly endless, Wrapping up a lesson with a small homework assignment, or introducing a new subject with a small clip of one of these power-packed trips or just filling the time with a little brain cool down break after a large assignment. The versatility of this program is what in my opinion really makes up for. 

The twenty-first century has multiple benefits in regards to technology, especially in our everyday use along with almost every profession. In the world of education, on the other hand, the uses for technology are endless, I say this because you no longer need to sit at a printer station in a break room while trying to do lesson plans and staple packets of papers for your students, now we upload one document to a cloud attach that PDF or JPG that is needed to be given out to all of your classes for your day in less than 5 minutes. That information can be sent out within seconds. With the use of technology, we have programs now to help engage students in newer more effective ways to fully get a full circle collaboration in the classroom like programs such as Quizlet live, Kahoot.it, or Quizizz. The collaboration with technology impacts every different situation of teaching, whether in-person instruction but also full virtual as we discovered during the last year and a half pandemic. Statistics show this based on the article “Enhancing education with collaboration technology” by Kendra Gallegos, which states “85 percent of instructors interviewed by Campus Technology say tech has a positive effect on teaching.” This statement reinforces the fact that tech really has impacted the classroom greatly. Collaborating technology in the educational field helps broaden the impact to the students bringing new visuals and information to truly be effective to the students. In the aspect of extra help or longer teaching sessions that can be aided with face-to-face video call software. In my opinion, collaborating technology is a very impactful and successful route for teaching applications and will further brighten our horizons for students now and for the future. As per my own situations with technology I myself being a student have reaped the benefits of technology collaboration in my own education through the pandemic, I was able to access information in the comfort of my own home, video chat with peers to work on group projects or hold study sessions to prepare for upcoming tests.  The technology collaboration truly drove my success, made my learning more personalized, and engaged me in ways I never thought I could.