A Whole New Perspective

As educators, we are tasked with teaching the whole student and not just bits of knowledge from our particular content area. The difficult to quantify soft skills, such as empathy, open-mindedness, and cultural competence, are all important concepts for our students to learn and consciously practice on a consistent basis. Although they may not be part of our core curriculum, we should still find creative ways to integrate these (and other) important concepts into lessons. One simple solution is by incorporating a more refined and targeted use of Google.

Just about every student today has intimate knowledge of the power of Google. It’s user-friendly, effortless, and expands our capacity for knowledge in infinite ways. But we are probably only scratching the surface of Google’s strengths and capabilities. If we want to teach a skill like empathy, we probably would like to get students to see things from different perspectives (walk a mile in someone else’s shoes). Yes, using a basic Google search offers a vast amount of perspectives from tons of diverse sources, but it can be difficult to sift through the sheer amount of data and articles offered by any given search. The answer to this information overload dilemma is using the word site in our searches! This allows us to tailor our searches to specific countries, states, agencies, etc. When searching for a given topic, let’s just say global warming, write the name of the topic in the search bar and site: wherever you want. So, here’s how it would look if I wanted to search for global warming information from the UK; global warming site:uk. If I wanted to get information on global warming from the perspective of the Brazilian government, I would search; global warming site:gov.br. Then if I wanted to compare that information to what universities in Brazil were discovering about global warming, I would search; global warming site:edu.br. By simply using site:, we can create focused searches that offer unique information for our students.

When students are working on research projects and finding valid sources from a variety of viewpoints, they can develop a better awareness of other/outside ideas and share the feelings of another individual or group. They can also utilize news.google.com/newspapers and search through thousands of newspapers from around the world and look at a historical event from a different lens. Helping students think about global issues in a new way will produce increased levels of cultural competency and inclusivity in the classroom. Using site: and Google News are just two small, easy ways to promote empathy and offer new perspectives in the classroom. Common Sense also offers a few great ways to build empathy with your students using digital tools: https://www.commonsense.org/education/videos/3-ways-to-build-empathy-with-digital-tools