Recently in Your Voice Category

 

SustainUS, United States Youth for Sustainable Development, is calling for submissions to its annual CitizenScience essay contest. This year, the competition theme will focus on the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, sustainable development, and current challenges in line with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

Here are five reasons why you should enter:

1. Share your passion for addressing the world's toughest challenges through sound science.
2. Join the SustainUS delegation to the 56th Session of the UN Commission on Status of Women in New York.
3. Present your work and communicate the importance of youth involvement to international leaders.

What do you get when you take a seasoned geography educator, send him on a multi-week adventure to the Amazon, and equip him with a blog to tell his story? Twenty-one days of inspired teaching moments and fascinating photographs!

We invite teachers and their students to follow along as Herb Thompson, better known to his colleagues and former students as "Geoman," travels from Nassau, Bahamas, to the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil, to it's terminus in Iquitos, Peru. Herb is a retired world geography teacher who has been a teaching consultant and co-coordinator for the National Geographic-supported Nevada Geographic Alliance for several decades.

Twenty-five years ago Herb embarked on a Semester at Sea adventure that changed his life and those of the many students who would benefit from his enlightened teachings about the world. Prior to his Semester at Sea experience Herb had traveled to one foreign country--Mexico--he has since visited 65.

Long-time readers of this blog know that each year My Wonderful World hosts a Blog-a-thon during Geography Awareness Week (November 13-19, 2011) inviting contributors around the world to share their geographic voice. This year, we are making the Blog-a-thon bigger and better than ever before, and we need your help! We are accepting submissions of all forms ranging from traditional blogs to digital media (e.g. photos, videos, music) to art work, academic papers or even old geography homework assignments. You can be a special part of GA Week by sending us your best original geographic creations. Teachers: this is a great opportunity to get your classroom involved in thinking critically and writing about geography, and for your students to see their work posted onto the web.
The 2011 GA Week theme is "Geography: The Adventure in Your Community."  It is about connections between people and their surrounding environments, local action, and, of course, geography education. Starting now, we will be accepting any geography-related blog posts that honor Geography Awareness Week, the 2011 theme of "Adventure in Your Community," and geography or geographic education in general. You can e-mail your intention of submission at anytime to NatGeoEd@ngs.org--just let us know what you have in mind, and we will be on the lookout for your work. With the Blog-a-thon in mind, this week's Five for Friday looks at five cool ideas for ways to participate. Get inspired!

1. The "Classic": Write a blog. (Duh!) Here are some great ideas to get you started on your brainstorm:

• Document your daily activities in blog format, showing how place and space play an important role on your route to work, when shopping for food, or while sending a text message to your friends in California. It may surprise you just how much geography is incorporated into your daily life!

• Write a blog post about the geography of a particular current event topic, or a series of news stories you have followed over the past year. Talk about how major changes in climate, natural disasters, and developing cultures/nations have played a part in your life or your understanding of what it means to be geo-literate.

•  Describe a representation of your "world." Include all your favorite things about this Earth and the places you want to see and experience. Do some critical thinking: How would your perspective of your world change if you were born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Beijing, China; or Curepto, Chile?

2. The "Art-star": Not much for words? Try creating a unique piece of art that represents GA Week. Think painting, sculpting, drawing, jewelry-making, collage, graphic design, and beyond! Scan or photograph what you have crafted and send it to us with your basic information, a description of your art, what it means to you and, how it celebrates the geography of our world.

We just completed usability testing for our brand new Education website, NatGeoEd.org, this week. We invited students, parents, and educators to navigate our website in one-on-one sessions with an independent moderator. They told us what they thought about everything from the layout and design of the site to the technical functionality of the tools to the content of the educational material. It was extremely interesting to watch from behind a one-way mirror, and we were lucky to get very positive, constructive feedback.

But of course, we can't bring every website user to Washington, D.C. for a one-on-one session. So, we're inviting you all to take our online survey and tell us what you think about the new beta website. Here's why you should take the survey today.

1) Be one of the first to explore our brand new, leading-edge education website.
After years of research and hard work, we're finally ready to share this beta version with you. Come see all the activities, articles, mapping and multimedia tools we have developed for educators and learners like you.

2) Time is running out!
We're tallying results of the survey at the end of this month (May 31). [Don't worry, you'll still be able to give us feedback via the "Tell Us What You Think" buttons on the website, but it won't be included in this initial survey data].

3) Get a discount at the National Geographic online store as a thank-you for your time and effort completing the survey. May is a great time to stock up on books and other summer learning materials for the family, and our store has plenty to offer!

Help select a winner from the final six nominees in the P&G and National Geographic Future Friendly Contest!

The time to vote is NOW--before March 16. The top six entries are accessible online at www.nationalgeographic.com/findyourfootprint. The public (that's you!) is encouraged to watch the project videos and vote for the class they consider to have the most creative conservation idea.
 
The classroom entry that receives the highest number of public votes will be the grand-prize winner and will be awarded prizes valued at $36,000, including five state-of-the-art Promethean ActivBoards (interactive whiteboards),  a National Geographic Library valued at $1,000, and 30 subscriptions to National Geographic Kids magazine.

Keep reading to learn more about the six finalists!

Each year our friend Matt Rosenberg over at About.com's Geography hub compiles his list of the top geographic events.

Of course, we all love a good list, especially an annual retrospective--and really, what better way is there to make use of the downtime between Christmas and New Year's (for those of us who celebrate those holidays) than to reflect on the previous 360 days of highs and lows?

Please read the list, and then tell us: What do you think? Are there other events you would have liked to see included?

[I'm a bit embarrassed to be posting this article so late--sorry Matt! I guess 2011 just got ahead of me. Anyway, here it is without further ado!]

CLICK HERE to see the list of the Top 5 Geographic Events of 2010

Here are some items I might add:
 

Make your voice heard in the national dialogue about conservation for the 21st century! President Obama's America's Great Outdoors Initiative has provided an online forum for you to share your ideas, comments, and opinions about effective conservation efforts. Want to join the conversation and make a difference? Support environmental education organizations like NatureBridge by commenting on and voting for the discussion that promotes environmental education in national parks. Here's how to help:

1.    Create an account on the America's Great Outdoors online forum
2.    Add your comments to the discussion titled "Environmental Education in our National Parks - America's Best Classroom"
3.    Click the link next to the title to promote the discussion!

CALLING ALL GEOGRAPHERS, cartographers, general geo-nerds and activists, techies, teachers, politicians, moms, dads, students...and anyone who's ever had an interesting thought about geography. We want to hear from YOU this Geography Awareness Week!

While this year's theme focuses on freshwater, we'll let you decide which specific geographic topic to write about:
 
·      Offer an opinion on a current event or policy issue.
·      Share a lesson plan or field trip idea.
·      Post a favorite photo.
·      Write a poem or design a work of art.
·      Show how geography connects to popular culture or everyday life.
Whatever!

Check out last year's blog-a-thon for ideas and examples, and email Sarah Jane  to reserve a spot.

Here's how the process will work:

"...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.