This past week, our Student Council leaders wanted to create Heritage Week activities to celebrate the diversity of our school community. They created a Google form asking students to identify a city, province, or country which they identified as a part of their heritage as well as favourite foods and songs. We wish we had done it at the beginning of the year, which is why I am capturing this in my blog; so I have these ideas for September.
From the information we gathered, I was able to share a Google Earth project with the Student Council team so we could add the countries to it collaboratively. One of the questions we asked was, “What is one thing you wish others knew about your culture?” and in Google Earth, we were able to edit the project to add that information (anonymous of course). We also knew that not everyone contributed, so we continued to share the form so we could keep adding places; this is the beauty of Google Earth projects-that we could update it in real time without changing the URL.
Here’s what it looked like and here is information about how to create a Google Earth project of your own. We had so many comments about how much people enjoyed going through the project and learning more about the various countries.
We also borrowed an idea from Jason Trinh & Joe Tong to have everyone’s dish be included at the same table, so one of our Canva-rockstar students got creating and the rest of the students and the two teacher advisers got collaborating and this is what we came up with:
If we had more time, we would have labelled all of the dishes and hyperlinked recipes. We also used the favourite songs to create a Spotify playlist.
The real power of this for us was awareness and the conversations that came out of the activities. Even within our Council we had great conversations about what made our culture unique. I can’t wait to buy books for students that more directly reflect them and their experiences and build upon our diversity and uniqueness next year in deep and meaningful ways.
P.S. Raising Digital Leaders is going to be released on June 28th!! I created an Instagram account where I share tips and conversation starters. If you are a parent or caregiver, follow the account @RaisingDigitalLeaders for relevant content and a chance to win a book!