Global Collaborator
ISTE Standard for Students 7
Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally.
7a: Students use digital tools to connect with learners from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, engaging with them in ways that broaden mutual understanding and learning.
7b: Students use collaborative technologies to work with others—including peers, experts, or community members—to examine issues and problems from multiple viewpoints.
7c: Students contribute constructively to project teams, assuming various roles and responsibilities to work effectively toward a common goal.
7d: Students explore local and global issues and use collaborative technologies to work with others to investigate solutions.
Tool demonstrated: The Global Read Aloud
What is the Global Read Aloud? No, seriously, what is it?
The Global Read Aloud is a collaborative class activity that takes place all around the world at the very same time, where classes of students of all reading levels read a book together and form global and cross-cultural connections with other students and teachers. Created by Pernille Ripp in 2010 and blossoming to more than one million students participating, the Global Read Aloud offers teachers both flexibility in their lesson plans and bountiful opportunities to connect with other teachers to collaborate. Each teacher participating decides what level of involvement is right for them and how much time to devote to the Read Aloud. Every participant is then matched with other participants of comparable commitment to plan interactive lessons using tools like Twitter, Skype, Zoom, Kidblog, Padlet, and much, much more.
The aim of the Global Read Aloud is not only to have dedicated time in class for students to become invested in a literary work but also to show students that they are part of something much bigger than themselves when they are reading a book and discussing its myriad complexities with other students. As their tagline reads: “one book to connect the world.” As a future high school ELA educator, the Global Read Aloud offers not only an amazing way to scaffold lessons around a specific time frame of focus, it primarily offers me a wonderful opportunity for deep understanding and nuanced analysis with students of all backgrounds, not only the ones I have in my particular classroom. Students learn just as much—if not more—from one another and their own lived experience as they do from a teacher, and capitalizing on this fact using technology is crucial.
Want to read some more about the Global Read Aloud? Click the link below! Want to read my reflection instead? Just keep scrolling!
A screenshot of the “About” page on the Global Read Aloud’s website.
Reflection:
In a nutshell: the Global Read Aloud is a wonderful opportunity for educators and students of all grade levels to come together and form both literary and social connections across great distances. It’s free, it’s flexible, and it’s effective.
As a teacher who still has not quite figured out the magic behind unit planning, the idea of a flexible, remarkably social, and conceptually genitive unit that focuses on reading aloud is a wonderful gift from heaven. With so much freedom and yet so much scaffolding from your partner teacher and other teachers in the GRA groups on Facebook, the teacher support and student engagement comes naturally and with the least possible friction points.
At first, I was a little bit apprehensive of the Global Read Aloud due to the majority of its promotional material being focused on elementary and early middle school classrooms. Diving a little deeper, though, I found a list of books used in the unit since 2010, showing off the incredible breadth of texts available for analysis. I also kicked myself for having a knee-jerk reaction to using children’s literature in a high school ELA classroom—one of my most informative and wonderful courses I attended during my time as an undergraduate was a high level children’s lit analysis course that heavily emphasized the critical and theory-based reading of kid lit from many different cultures. Children’s literature has a distinct place in ELA classrooms, but scaffolding for student appreciation needs to be built up before high school students can unironically analyze a text made for a much younger audience. This is something the Global Read Aloud can definitely help with, as it shows students many other classrooms also critically analyzing the same text!
Evocative literature can be thought of as bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside. Endless theoretical unpacking, endless ways to view different words and their pragmatic context, endless ways to discuss or locate a central theme. The Global Read Aloud facilitates these non-Euclidian narrative spaces purely from the collaborative aspect itself, a frame of interpretation overlaid upon any text being analyzed. “This is important,” it says, “not only because you and your class are saying it’s important, but because all of these millions of students are as well.”
As educators wanting to show our students a robust and beautiful world of literary analysis and complex interpretation, it’s crucial that as many students from as many different backgrounds and existing funds of knowledge as possible are able to add to a conversation. This is what changes viewpoints, this is what promotes global communication. The Global Read Aloud easily meets ISTE Standard 7 for students, especially subsections 7a and 7b pertaining to using technological tools to connect with learners of all cultures and analyze topics from multiple viewpoints.
