ISTE 2 Connecting Students Globally

ISTE 2 discusses communication and collaboration "Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others."

The subsection that I focuses on in this standard is "Develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures". I was originally attracted to because I really believe that the best way to become gain more knowledge of other cultures is from experiences with individuals from those cultures. I questioned myself to look for ways to engage my future kindergartners with others across the globe in a way that is safe and appropriate. Through my investigation I found kidblog.org ( https://kidblog.org/home/ ). This is a site that you can pay for (one of my peers discovered that it is $44 a year or $9 a month) and have access to interactive portfolios and blogs for your students. What drew me to this site is that it can be used from kindergarten to high school. Student can create an avatar and can personalize their portfolio, even make vidoes. This site makes it easy to connect to other classes that use kidblog by following another class or entering in your search criteria.
https://kidblog.zendesk.com/hc/en-us This link to the left is a link to their help page. I am posting it because it helps you understand the site more providing links to classroom examples, FAQ, tutorials and webinars.
Another site that one of my peers help me find is http://www.epals.com/#/connections . This site is different from kidblog because you are connecting individual students to individual students, rather than whole classes collaborating on a project. This could be a great way to create unique and genuine friendships between students on your class to other in different cultures. What I like about this site is that you can select an age range, the youngest age is 3!

I appreciated this section of researching because it is so important to connect students to other students who are different from them. I was not aware that there are SO MANY sites out there that make this possible for even our kindergartners (or preschoolers). I hope to utilize both of these sites with my future students. I know they will benefit from it and so would I!