Edutopia

The first video podcast that I watched was called the Edible Schoolyard. This was really neat to see that there is a school that is able to create this type of learning program for students. For a lot of students, the outdoors are not some place that they go. They only know that food comes from the store, and this program gives them a sense of where food actually comes from. This interested me so much that I decided to see if there were more programs like this in other areas. I found three others. One is at San Francisco Boys & Girls Club, Willie Mays Clubhouse, Hunters Point, you can view the website here. Another one is in Greensboro, North Carolina at the Greensboro Children's Museum, and you can explore that website by going here. the last one I found was really close to home. It is in New Orleans at Samuel J Green Charter School,located in the Orleans Parish. The website is located here. This one is a bit different from the school in Berkeley. It has an Open Garden the second Saturday every month where the entire community is welcome to help cultivate and harvest the garden. This establishes a sense of community, and after Katrina the city really needs this. Following another link on the website, I found another website dedicated to the garden, and you can see it here.


The next video I watched was about the Global Village. It was very interesting. Children were separated into groups ad given different "countries" to live in for the night. Each group had somethings, but no one group had everything. One group were refugees in a refugee camp and they had nothing, not even the same language. Each group had to learn to cooperate with each other and the other groups to get everything they needed. This taught them to work together and also gave them a sense of what is was like to live in a different culture without all the things they were used to having. At the end of the video there were some brief interviews with some of the students. One girl said she now understands why she needs to take action in her community. There is a part of the Heifer International website for educators that tells you how you can help and educate your students about world hunger. It may not be possible for every school to stay over night in one of the Global Village sites, but this website can help them learn things about the way others live and what others sometimes have to go without. There are lesson plans, classroom activities, and a resource library. It is worth checking out, and if you are interesting in helping further, you can go to the website Heifer International to get involved. You can also follow them on Twitter.