Recently in For Educators Category

Read the August 2010 Newsletter: "Inspire students to take action this year!"

INSIDE:
Editor's Pick: Special Guest Blogger Elisabeth Soep talks about her inspiring new book,
Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories.

August Challenge: Plan a service-learning project
GeoFeature: 4-H2O: National Youth Science Day
GeoNews: U.N. declares "International Year of Youth"
Blog: A Kid, a Campaign, Iceland

"...Young people can use media to learn about places close to home and far away. The connections they form seem to shrink the physical distance that separates citizens around the world, even as they can reveal disparate experiences and inequalities that young reporters examine through their media stories."










We've all heard the stories of major news organizations struggling in the digital age of new media. If there's a silver lining to the decline of the media behemoths, it's the emergence of more opportunities for diverse perspectives in reporting. For more than 15 years, Youth Radio has been helping under-served young people develop strong leadership, journalism, and media production skills. The National Geographic Education Foundation has supported Youth Radio's work fostering story-telling and civic engagement around local and global issues through grant contributions to the organization. Now, we are excited to join Youth Radio in celebrating the release of a new book about the success of their empowering, educational programs.

There's nothing like a newsroom to make the world feel big and small at the same time. Put young people in charge, and the effect can be even more extreme. At Youth Radio, a Peabody Award-winning, youth-driven production company headquartered in Oakland, California, young people produce stories distributed through global broadcast and digital outlets including National Public Radio, The Huffington Post, iTunes, and YouTube. At a single editorial meeting at Youth Radio, young people and their adult producers might pitch stories on the effects of budget cuts inside local Oakland schools, young soldiers returning from the Iraq war, healthcare reform in a rural Kentucky town, and the transnational Korean musical genre known as K-POP. Inside these freewheeling discussions are recurring teachable moments through which young people can use media to learn about places close to home and far away. The connections they form seem to shrink the physical distance that separates citizens around the world, even as they can reveal disparate experiences and inequalities that young reporters examine through their media stories.

In my new book, Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories, Vivian Chávez and I take readers behind the scenes at Youth Radio, inside meetings and stories like the ones I've just described. In each chapter, we present a series of Youth Radio media features, detail the negotiations and inquiries that supported their production, and then highlight implications for learning, teaching, journalism, and media justice efforts.

Ok, so you've heard us talk about GIS (Geographic Information Systems) before on this blog. A LOT.

But let's be honest: Chances are you've probably never actually used a GIS to analyze geographic data and make maps. Most casual geography buffs don't have their own license for a GIS software package such as ArcGIS, which is usually purchased by businesses or universities. And if you're not a classroom teacher, then you've probably never used AEJEE, either, a free GIS "lite" program for educators and students.

Well, now's your chance to give GIS a shot!

Two months after the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico began gushing, the scale of the disaster has only increased.  Sometimes scale can be difficult to visualize from news stories, but these oil spill visualization tools can help!

Parents: Talk with your kids about how the size of the spill compares to geographic areas they might be familiar with (e.g. your county, the size of the national park you visited on vacation last year, etc.)

Teachers: Have students try to identify land areas that might be the same size as the oil spill (e.g. small U.S. states, islands, and European countries), and then crunch the numbers to see how their guesses measure up.

Thursday, June 10th, ethnic violence broke out in the southern city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan.  Shortly after, American newspapers and news channels began covering the story.


For many of us, Kyrgyzstan isn't a country we hear about often. We're likely unsure of what language Kyrgyzstanis speak, what type of government they have, how big the country is, where it is located, and even how to pronounce or spell "Kyrgyzstan." 

Without context, stories of violence in Kyrgyzstan on news programs and in newspapers are nothing more than stories, confined to a 2D non-reality.







Courtesy New York Times

Fifty-six days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, with hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil continuing to spill into the Gulf of Mexico, more exploratory, off-shore drilling is still scheduled to commence July 1st in the Arctic. 

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Shell is scheduled to begin drilling in Alaska this July.  The proposed drill sites are in areas noted for extreme storms, strong winds, moving sea ice, and subzero temperatures.  These conditions would make it very difficult--if not impossible--for a successful response in the case of an oil spill. 

It has been more than a month since the April 20th Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to an oil spill that, according to the Guardian, has already dumped 42-100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  Since then, the news has been filled with stories about skimming, tubes, domes, Top-Kill, cut and cap plans, and economic and environmental degradation. 


Public beaches were closed Friday in Grand Isle, La., as oil, dead fish, and birds washed ashore.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/05/25/us/jp-SPILL-1.html

The massive impact of this disaster is difficult to wrap our minds around, and yet it is increasingly important that we try to do so.  This disaster is not an abstract story in the news.  It is a tragic misfortune that affects people, economic chains, ecosystems, and the planet.  Most importantly, it is preventable. 

In permit applications to drill in the Gulf, BP said that it was, "prepared to handle an oil spill more than ten times larger than the one now spewing crude," according to reports from Alison Fitzgerald of Bloomberg News.  Bob Deans, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, categorized BP's actions as, "overpromised and underdelivered.  They told us they had a plan that could deal with the consequences of a worst-case scenario. They don't."

Even though the worst case scenario detailed in BP's disaster plan was far worse than the Deepwater Horizon spill, this spill is a worst case scenario for the local economy and environment.

The Oil Spill and the Economy

Students using crayons and a map of the world can draw their best guesses of what the distribution of temperatures is like all around the world in the month of July. This activity can be engaging to students, giving them a chance to draw on what they know in a way that makes them curious about what they don't know. This lesson is based on research that says that if students are asked to articulate their current understanding of a phenomenon before they are taught something new about it, then they learn the new material more effectively because they can connect it to their existing understanding.

Giving people an image of what learning could be like is a really important part of improving education. Students, teachers, administrators, parents, policy makers, and community members have remarkably similar views of what education looks like, and those views have not changed much since we were in school.