Choose Your View	10 Big Ideas

  An HTML white paper on "Why." Global connections is about thinking globally, communicating with others outside your local community, broadening your horizons, and building relationships with people all over the world. Teachers have traditionally given lessons on cultural and global issues, and now the Internet provides a new forum for communicating with people across the earth.

  Frank Miracola is a fifth-grade teacher at Armada Elementary School in Armada, Michigan. Frank has been teaching for over 12 years, and has received recognition as a leader in the use of technology in the classroom.

1. Art Across The Planet Unit
     In this unit, students will create drawings of their own homes and those that they imagine might be found in a foreign country. Students will also conduct research on that particular foreign country using a variety of sources.
   • Lesson One: Imagining Homes and Environments. Students choose a foreign country and create paintings of what they think homes might look like based on basic data about environments present in the country.

   • Lesson Two: Exploring Homes and Resources. Students use a variety of resources to search for images of and information about the exchange country's environments and housing.

   • Lesson Three: Exchanging Art. Students create drawings of their own homes and exchange them with another classroom of students in the foreign exchange country.

2. The Language of Art Unit
     This unit provides an opportunity for art specialists and foreign language instructors to collaborate and engage in team teaching.
   • Lesson One: Learning the Language of Art. Students learn to explore artworks using the language of aesthetic and critical inquiry.

   • Lesson Two: Language Transformations. Students translate their aesthetic and critical knowledge into a foreign language they are studying.

   • Lesson Three: Common Contexts for Inquiry. Students establish a relationship with another group of students who are studying the same foreign language or have the reverse complement of first and second languages from the first classroom and agree to exchange aesthetic and critical responses to the same images from an Internet site.

   • Lesson Four: Questioning Images. Students write their aesthetic and critical responses to the common images from Lesson Three in a foreign language and exchange them with the students in the collaborating classroom.

   • Lesson Five: Comparing Observations. Students discuss the responses from the exchange classroom and compare similarities and differences in aesthetic and critical interpretations.

1. Keypals
     Students will begin communicating over e-mail with students around the world in preparation for future collaborative activities.

2. South America Field Trip
     Students will discuss the Spanish-speaking country in South America. From library or WWW resources in team work, students will get general/profound knowledge about the Hispanich countries in the area.

  Tips & Techniques for creating connections that allow students to share their knowledge and experiences with others and to develop their own sense of how they are alike and different from others on this planet.

  Related Resources A list of resources to help explore global connections via the Internet

Choose Your View	10 Big Ideas