Update: Connecting Students Across Borders and Cultures
GEF’s collaboration with educators across the globe leveraging technology and innovation is taking shape! Earlier this year, we shared the news of a budding initiative with our grantee partner, Project Vision, from Bangalore, India, to test a new online platform. This Platform — placeTALKS — puts students in the lead to direct their learning by communicating online with other students across the globe,with a focus on STEAM (Science,Technology,Engineering, the Arts,and Math) initiatives.
To gauge interest in this project, we joined the Project Vision team in April on exploratory visits with educators in the Denver area. The response from students and teachers has been enthusiastic with a second visit to Denver/Boulder in August by Arzu Mistry (Project Vision’s lead on the project).
We are thrilled to let you know that three schools have confirmed their intent and interest to participate in this pilot project. In fact, students in Englewood, Denver and Boulder will be the primary U.S. beta testers for this platform along with counterparts in Bangalore at the Drishya Learning Centers (supported by GEF) as well as select government and non government schools in India. The U.S. schools participating are — Englewood High School, Mackintosh Academy (Littleton and Boulder campuses) and Sims Fayola school in Denver.
As a reminder, placeTALKS is an online platform being created by Project Vision with support from MIT Media Labs and the state government of Karnataka. It will enable children from all over the world to share stories and geotag them on a Google map of planet Earth. Stories are a powerful pedagogical tool that embrace linguistic, economic and academic diversity. The opportunity is for placeTALKS to bring science and mathematics to life for students,potentially in the context of UNESCO’s Mathematics of Planet Earth initiative. The initial pilot is taking place Fall/Winter 2013/2014 and it will wrap up with a joint reflection and sharing by students as well as educators, their schools, Project Vision and GEF.
Specifically placeTALKS will allow students to:
• Create Invitations that invite others to investigate their local neighborhoods — historically, geographically, socially and scientifically — using a variety of approaches (such as a visit to an observatory to view the stars).
• Post Explorations that explore these invitations through different approaches (such as tracking the trajectory of a comet), and
• Create and share Stories (through animations, podcasts, videos, still-images, blogs or wikis), geotag them to a specific location, and find, compare and converse about them with others across the world.
The platform will also have a shared directory for students and educators to contribute resources (such as a toolkit on how to build your own microscope) for others to access and use.
Bill Gilmore, the STEM coordinator across Englewood schools, has shared with us why his students,teachers and administrators are keen to participate in this pilot. In their eyes, placeTALKS presents a chance for students to engage in meaningful ways with those beyond their school borders. It also allows them to explore new ideas, see reactions from different “places,” while solving problems and challenges with others. Through this initiative, students will gain an understanding of diverse perspectives and learn that a range of outcomes can arise from one, seemingly similar set of issues. Already, at Englewood, there are over 55 students signed up for placeTALKS.
One Englewood student had an idea right off the bat — to use a GoPro camera to record ‘one day in her life’ — with the intent to post an invitation on placeTALKS for a student in Bangalore to do the same. Bill and his fellow teachers see unique learning opportunities for their students, including that of beta testing a new online platform and of turning an interesting idea into reality. Their students’ context will be global — reaching across boundaries of place and culture— in real time with other young people. They see endless possibilities for growth and learning, for their students and themselves!
At GEF, we support this initiative as part of our commitment to quality education for children living in poverty around the world. We believe in local educators and entrepreneurs and their ability to develop innovative approaches, like placeTALKS, to accelerate learning across cultural and economic spaces – in this case by leveraging technology. We will continue to seek out these innovators and share their good work with you and with our grantee partners.
Back to Fall 2013 Newsletter
