Raising Awareness: People on the Thai-Burmese Border

My daughter, Betty Berdan, is going to Thailand in March, where she will volunteer at the Burma Children’s Medical Clinic and a local school. She is raising funds to donate to the organization. 100% of her donations go to the people in need living on the Thai-Burmese border.

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Media Praise for Raising Global Children!

Raising Global Children continues to receive praise from language learning experts.

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Go Global News Round Up

It’s been a very busy fall for me speaking and writing, and I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to share what’s new. So I’ve decided to do “news round up” of sorts here.

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Kids Having Fun with Food: A Global Adventure

Global education doesn’t have to be something formal or solely academic. We can learn about each other on a human level through sharing of culture, especially foods.

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Global Education Is Proven to Be Better General Education

Global education, the term itself creates confusion and consternation among academics, but can be defined as teaching children about the world and thereby helping them develop a global mindset. It includes learning a foreign language and provides a much better overall education for today’s children.

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Friendships Across Cultures

Wherever we live, we should expect to be sharing our schools, communities, neighborhoods, clubs, and houses of worship with people from increasingly diverse backgrounds, the ones that globalization brought here. With this diverse population, our children have the important means of building friendships with different children to bridge the gap between cultures.

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What Does Language Proficiency Mean?

Proficiency in a second language takes a lot of practice — or time on task. ACTFL’s AAPPL test can determine a student’s level and help track progress over the years.

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10 Tips for Raising a Global Child

We must inspire our children to be curious about the world and to become globally aware. We must teach our children to appreciate, communicate and interact with people across different cultures and in other countries — and that includes learning a second language as early as possible and studying abroad if feasible.

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PISA Is a Wake-up Call but to Whom and For What?

There are plenty of stories to be found on the “wake-up call” that’s needed (but we said the same thing three years ago), but what, exactly, are we being called to “wake up” to? As a parent and business person who advocates for greater global awareness and more foreign language learning in our schools, a few things stand out.

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A Confluence of Fluency in Orlando

At ACTFL: I’m not a language teacher — and I don’t speak another language with any degree of proficiency — but I have great admiration for those who do.

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