How Can You Make Use of Free Digital Material?

Our global future is emerging through communication, cooperation, and innovation, all of which are technology-dependent. The Internet is now a global marketplace, a global workplace, and a global meeting spot, providing a wide variety of ways not only to learn about the world but also to connect with the world. Universities that accept low GMAT/GRE scores have adopted the use of digital material.

In a global age, digital media literacy provides more than just using technology to do the things that have been done before by hand, such as data or word processing, information storage, knowledge presentation, and one-to-one communication. It now enables easy participation in the sophisticated global interactions and networks that our wired world offers.

Universities that accept low GMAT/GRE scores have learned about the potential of a technology-rich approach to education in the past decade. This includes funds and associated skills development for classroom technology. Students and educators should take this opportunity to pair digital media and technology with global learning for the 21st century in order to better change teaching and learning for the global age.

Consider these five new media and technology techniques that can help students both appreciate and relate to the prosperity and uncertainty of the digital material present all over the internet.

How to Harness Digital Media and Technology for Global Learning?

1. Build media literacy. 

It can help students locate, view, interpret, and assess media from around the world, including local language and English translations of international news outlets. Go deeper to foster knowledge of how and why the global mass media portrays various events, peoples, societies, and cultures and how this reflects different backgrounds and influences cross-cultural understanding.

When conducting research, students from universities that accept low GMAT/GRE scores can use multiple foreign media outlets and ask them to analyze the reasons why different sources take different viewpoints as part of their results. Be sure to build this into rubrics for assessment.

2. Discover the personal views behind global problems.

 Expand the exposure of students to views from other nations through independently produced digital media, such as blog posts, podcasts, and videos, as well as a dialogue through discussion boards, video conferences, and any number of shared technology resources.

The Artistic Voices of Islam project of the Asian Community helps encourage an increased awareness of the diversity of Islamic voices within Asia’s multicultural societies. Started in high schools in the U.S. and Indonesia this year, students from universities that accept low GMAT/GRE scores can create digital audio slideshows about the history, cultures, and practices of their societies, shared and discussed on the website of Asia Society. Students use the new experiences they have gained to create collaborative productions and screen media projects in their communities through an online exchange.

3. Tap into networks of global awareness.

 Enable students to understand the power of “collective intelligence” through global networks that collect and analyze information. Participation in these networks helps students to gain cross-cultural awareness when solving global problems, synthesizing multi-cultural information, and engaging in global teams to responsibly draw on and create new knowledge from established knowledge.

There are several collaborative research ventures online that are leading the way. Operated by NASA and the National Science Foundation in 110 countries, the GLOBE initiative (Global Learning and Findings to Support the Environment) involves youth, educators, community members, and scientists in the international gathering and exchange of data on important environmental issues.

Contact organizations that allow students to work on global problems and projects together. They provide teacher pedagogical support and interactive programming for students.

4. Use online publishing to engage a global audience.

Students from universities that accept low GMAT/GRE scores can not only share their research and ideas in a classroom or school these days through technology but also share their learning internationally through online publishing tools and websites that reach a global audience.

The International Insider student newspaper of New York City’s College of Staten Island High School for International Studies (CSI) is one example. CSI students are in constant dialogue with student reporters in other nations, such as Bahrain, Belarus, Egypt, Poland, and Syria, to cover issues from global warming to the Iraq conflict, using a free blogging program. Via the PEARL World Youth News Service, a collaboration between iEARN and the Daniel Pearl Foundation that serves as an international wire service for publishing youth-produced news articles online and in student newspapers worldwide, they have also contributed to student newspapers around the world.

Using Blogger or WordPress and other similar programs, publishing is as simple as starting a free blog. For a more formal and more advanced alternative, consider the ThinkQuest competition for students from the Oracle Foundation. Integrated global teams solve world challenges and publish the world’s research and recommendations.

5. Grasp global complexity and build solutions.

Students can test global hypotheses when immersing themselves in the target content through the use of virtual reality, games, and modeling applications that replicate real-world interactions through technology.

In New York City, Global Kids, an after school initiative, incorporated game design into their teenage online leadership program. A high school youth group developed “Ayiti: The Cost of Life,” collaborating with Global Kids employees and a game design company, in which players learn about poverty by taking virtual responsibilities for a fictional family in Haiti, making choices about when to send kids to school vs. work, and how to invest limited resources.

Games for Change, an organization that promotes interactive games for social change, can be found through Ayiti and other ‘serious games’ on global issues.

Computers, video conferencing, computer games, web courses, blogs, websites for video sharing, mobile phones, Web 2.0 tools help link our globe like never before. They have bridged gaps and improved our chances of learning from each other: visiting new locations, meeting new people, discovering other cultures, learning new languages, and exchanging and evolving ideas. For teachers and students, getting the world into the classroom has never been quicker, simpler, or more inspiring.

In several classrooms and curricular areas, digital technology can help students explore their environment. Google Earth, which is transforming the face of geography, history, and science instruction, is a case in point. Via satellite views, students may explore regions or get street-level views of a particular area. Real-time views via Google Earth of ancient sites in Turkey or new construction in Hong Kong enliven the study of places outside the classroom in ways that can not fit images and, in some cases, even video.

Acknowledge and Weigh Perspectives

Students from universities that accept low GMAT/GRE scores that have global competence are able to weigh their own and other perspectives and also against the perspectives provided by evidence, research, and history. The variations between these points of view can also be understood and expressed by students. Via emerging innovations, which have been a major force in providing extended opportunities for global discovery, learning, and reflection, one exciting way to provide such experiences is. To students who do not have the ability to fly, these innovations are particularly useful. In a new environment, virtual worlds immerse young learners and inspire exploration.

Curriculum Digital Material for Students

• CTECS: These free, online learning modules and vocabulary exercises help students develop workplace readiness skills that are integral to the world of work, such as an appreciation for diversity, imagination and innovation, work ethics, teamwork, and conflict resolution.

• Edmodo: Find curriculum from educators around the world.

• Global Oneness Project: Free culturally diverse stories, videos, and accompanying lesson plans for high school and college classrooms.

• Journeys in Film: Films that encourage middle school students’ international education, cultural awareness, and media literacy.