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1) National Archives
At the National Archives site, I visited "Picturing the Century", a collection of photographs from the 20th century. The photographs selected for the exhibit did a phenomenal job of capturing various emotional moments of the 20th century, from a suffragette picketing for voting rights, to the first footsteps on the moon. The photographs selected in the exhibit also succeeded in capturing the diversity of America, featuring people of different age groups, ethnicities, socio-economic levels and religious beliefs. This website allows you to experience history first hand from the eyes of someone who was there, and understand the emotional impact of a certain moment in time, which is often lost in the usual "facts and dates" third-hand telling found in most history textbooks.

Photographs are powerful emotional tools. One picture in particular that really stuck me was a photograph of a very large box of thousands of gold wedding rings US troops had found when they raided a Nazi concentration camp. I don't think there's a more powerful symbol of eternal love then a wedding band, and seeing so many rings collected together shows how many families were destroyed by the Nazi regime.

2) National Education Association
Ways to become a more culturally-competent educator
Create a cultural competence committee or task force. Include administrators, teachers, education support professionals, students, family, and community representatives. The committee can serve as the primary governing body for planning, implementing, and evaluating organizational cultural competence initiatives.

When making decisions, I think it's important to have a diverse body to brainstorm solutions. Students, teachers, administrators, and community members will each have different viewpoints and experiences that are valuable to consider. Furthermore, by including members outside of the school from the community, the school become more integrated with the community and seen as a valued part of the community, rather than a separate entity. Developing a good relationship with the community is especially important as the community helps fund the school from property taxes, and makes decisions that could affect the school such as local bond and tax measures.

Network with other schools that are developing and implementing culturally competent systems. Adapt the processes and information that are consistent with your school's needs and interests.

I strongly believe that the sharing of ideas and information can lead to the development of new ideas. By connecting with teachers and administrators in neighboring schools who may be facing similar situations as your own school, you can effectively learn about what strategies are successful and what are not, and easily be able to adapt them for your own needs. Furthermore, you may be able to relay ideas your school has developed to other schools, which in turn may be useful for them. Education is not a contest, and it is in everyone's best interest that all teachers and students succeed. If something works, don't keep it a secret!

Identify and include budgetary expenditures each fiscal year to facilitate personnel development through their participation in conferences, workshops, and seminars on cultural competence.

Personal and professional development is essential to becoming a better teacher. Frequently, schools that want to implement a "diversity awareness" program give teachers very little, if any, guidelines or tools to become a more "socially literate" educator. There are numbers of workshops and conferences out there that promote multicultural educational and help train teachers to become more affective in a diverse classroom. However, attending these conferences can be expensive for a teacher to pay out of pocket, especially in addition to the other the other subject-specific conferences a teacher must attend for professional development. By providing funding for or hosting multicultural seminars or conferences, teachers can be better equipped with tools to be more affective and more culturally aware educators.

3) Kidsclick.org
At kidsclick.org, I did a search on "orchestra" and found playmusic.org, a website devoted to the orchestra and classical music. While kidsclick.org ranks playmusic.org as a 0-2 reading level, making it accessible for all readers, the website is by no means "juvenile", and would be accessible for kids from Kindergarten through Middle School of all reading abilities. One of the main features is an interactive orchestra, where students can click on an instrument and hear sound clips, and then read about the actual instrument. By reading and listening, students are able to learn through multiple intelligences and students who may not be as strong of readers or more auditory learners can still benefit from the website.

4) Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators
What was really nice about this website is it's an organized compiled list of other great education resources, making it easy to find a good source for a particular subject without having to comb through a Google web search for a good site. I really liked that it had links for teaching tools such has rubrics, and using technology for teaching. I'd probably use this site for the various links to lesson plans and evaluation tools to give me ideas to use.

5) Multiple Intelligences (Edutopia)
I’m rather familiar with the theory of multiple intelligences, though I had never heard of the so-called ninth intelligence “existential intelligence.” Traditional education tends to favor linguistic and logic-smart learner while alienating students with other strengths, so as a teacher it’s important to create activities that that stimulate other intelligences. I also thought the concept of “listening to teach” to be very interesting. By listening to the class as a whole and as individuals, teachers can help identify students learning intelligences and be able to cater instruction to their needs.

6) Teaching Tolerance
On the Teaching Tolerance website, I found a lesson plan regarding the song “Strange Fruit” by Lewis Allen, and made famous by Billie Holiday. The song, written at a time before music was widely used as a form of social protest, describes the horrors of lynching. Students listen to the song, and are asked to describe, perhaps in a brief pre-writing assignment, what they think the song is about. After the initial write, students can share with the class what they thought. Although the song is rather graphic, the images are a little abstract, so having a discussion can help ensure students are able to understand the meaning of the song. Students would then watch the documentary “Strange Fruit” by Joel Katz that explores the history and legacy of the song. This lesson would be a great introduction to discussing segregation which would ultimately lead to the Civil Rights movement or the role of music in social change and looking at various protest songs.

7). EdChange- Multicultural Awareness Quiz
I found it very shocking that it takes 500g of powder cocaine possession but only 5g of crack cocaine for an individual to be sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 5 years in prison, despite both contain roughly the same amount of drug per gram. This is disturbing on a number of different levels. 500g is a lot of cocaine, slightly over 1lb, so the law at present punishes dealers rather than individual users. This indicates that authorities believe cocaine to not be a “serious” drug, but rather a recreational drug of the rich. Many celebrities have been found to have been snorting cocaine (ie Lindsay Lohan) and at the very most got rehab. Crack, on the other hand punishes the user, by only requiring a possession of 5g for a mandatory five year prison sentence. Crack cocaine usage is more common among the poor, and disproportionately punishes far greater numbers of economically disadvantaged (and frequently minorities) then powder cocaine users.

I also found it disturbing (though I had guessed correctly) that the annual earnings of the average full-time worker in the US is equal to the daily earnings of the average American CEO. This further indicates how grossly disproportionate the distribution of wealth is in this country, not only between the rich and the poor, but between the rich and “average.” In Japan, the average CEO only makes approximately ten times the amount of the average worker. I find this especially disturbing in these troubling economic times where average workers are struggling to keep their jobs, while executives of even bankrupt companies being bailed out by the US government are receiving bonuses.

8) Netiquette
I got a 100% on the Netiquette quiz, but I am a seasoned citizen of the world wide web. Netiquette is important for students to learn since as we are becoming increasingly more reliant on technology, it’s important to understand the rules of behavior commonly practiced in a virtual setting. While many conventions of “netiquette” are common sense and similar to those in real life, some, such as the use of caps to indicate shouting, are unique to the Internet and need to be taught, especially to less “web-savvy” students, before committing faux-pas. Furthermore the anonymity of the Internet and being able to hide behind an avatar can lead to nasty interactions with other human beings, simply because there are no direct consequence associated when talking to a person directly face to face. It’s important for students to understand that when communicating online, they are not just talking to another computer or avatar, but an actual human being. =D (my favorite smiley, which I use way too much)