Darfur

Teachers Teaching Teachers #92 - Many Voices for Darfur - 02.20.08

Submitted by Paul Allison on Thu, 2008-03-06 04:02.

37:40 minutes (8.61 MB)

Listen to this podcast of 8th grade students from Maryland and Virginia talking about Darfur.

Then go to Many Voices for Darfur with you students and have them add their thoughts.

Thursday and Friday, March 6 and 7, 2008

Many Voices for Darfur

For 48 hours, starting at midnight Eastern standard time on March 6, 2008, many student voices will be collected in the name of those suffering in Darfur. Be sure that your voice is among them. Men, women, and children in the Darfur region of Sudan are dying. The Sudan militia and Janjaweed are responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths and 2,500,000 displaced refugees. You can learn more about the genocide taking place in Darfur by visiting the Many Voices for Darfur Wiki. Once you have had a chance to learn more about Darfur, please post your comment to one or more of the following prompts below:

If you could visit the camps in Chad and sit down one-on-one with a refugee who is your age, how would you explain what you or others are doing in your country to spread awareness and make a difference?
Write an open letter to Omar al-Bashir pleading your case for the Darfur region of Sudan.
Write an open letter to leaders in your country to make a case for government support of international efforts in Darfur.

Please read these RULES and GUIDELINES before posting your comment.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #90: Microblogging our way toward global awareness 02.06.08

Submitted by Paul Allison on Tue, 2008-02-19 19:07.

49:00 minutes (11.27 MB)

Some educators, including some of us who meet regularly on Teachers Teaching Teachers, have begun to find places in our curriculum for microblogging.

“Compared to regular blogging, microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By

http://www.flickr.com/photos/85666927@N00/1921842131

encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation. This is also one of its main differentiating factors from blogging in general. The second important difference is the frequency of update. On average, a prolific blogger may update her blog once every few days; on the other hand a microblogger may post several updates in a single day.” (Java Akshay, Tim Finin, Xaiodan Song, Bell Tseng, Why We Twitter: U

nderstanding Microblogging Usage and Communitites. August 12, 2007)

At the beginning of this podcast we explore microblogging with David Karp, the 21-year-old fou nder of Tumblr, an interesting new blogging platform that some of us have begun to use. VoiceThread founders, Ben Pappel and Steve Muth join us in this conversation as well. (Read more about microblogging below.)

In the last 15 or 20 minutes, (beginning at 31:14) we are joined by George Mayo, an 8th grade teacher in Maryland, and Wendy Dexler, a 3rd grade teacher in Florida, who joined each other at Educon 2.0 to create a Global Darfur Awareness Event which will take place on March 6th. (Read more about this project below.)

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