How to Give Back: She's the First

In scanning my favorite blogs, I found a post about a site called She's the First. It's an organization that helps match donors with girls in need of funds for education on an international level. This site offers several options for giving to a variety of countries. You can even team up with others to donate monthly. In some situations, the you can even keep in touch with the girl you're supporting.

Maybe this is the perfect holiday gift for that hard-to-buy-for someone who already has everything?

Bloggers Unite!

Recently, I came across a website called Bloggers Unite. The purpose of this site is to gather together bloggers who are interested in supporting any number of international events, like International AIDS Day, Human Rights Day, and International Animal Rights Day. I stumbled across this site as I was looking for information on International AIDS Day in conjunction with a lesson I was planning. Though I was not able to use this site with students for this event, there is serious potential to have students choose events or cause that they have some sort of belief or passion for and to support that interest by blogging.

All of my students have blogs that we use on a regular basis. The challenge in using this platform with students, I believe, is to make it as relevant and real as possible. If students are burdened with artificial tasks on their blogs, their blog space will not become the reflective, representative place that it has the potential to be. I think that there is enormous promise in sites like bloggers unite to allow students a safe entry into the realm of editorial writing. Students can choose a cause that they read about on this site, blog about it, maybe research it a little to gain extra facts, and then upload one of the badges provided to show their support of that particular event. This is an easy way to get students connected to international issues and to allow them to develop their sense of global citizenship.

Another way to use this site is to connect one of the events to whatever unit you're teaching at the time that the event occurs. For instance, I plan to use this site to get students blogging about International Human Rights Day in conjunction with A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. There are definitely instances of human rights abuses discussed in this memoir and my students are feeling the impact of those abuses through Beah's powerful use of language and imagery. Though my students are far removed from the setting of Beah's memoir, they can definitely use their online presence to support an increased awareness of this cause.

A Novel Idea: One Book For All

How do we promote literacy for all students and all teachers across ability levels and across content areas? One high school in New Jersey has found a model that has reached about 80% of its students and has engaged most of its teachers. As far as literacy initiatives go, this seems to be a successful venture. What did they do? They created a "One Book, One School" model where all students and all teachers are responsible for reading and talking about the same book.

I think that this is an awesome idea. I would worry about the funding of this project, but it seems that if enough players are invested, then this type of initiative could have some success. I remember that when I attended the University of Maine at Farmington for my undergraduate degree there was a "One Book, One Campus" program where students and faculty were encouraged to use and talk about one title per year. I don't know if this initiative was successful or not, but they seem to have a similar program going on now. Its name has changed, but it seems to have the same flavor as the original program.

Even if funding did not exist to buy enough books for every student to have a single copy, there could be an initiative to include as many people as possible lending library situation. There is even room to extend this initiative past the walls of the high school and to seek to include community members and younger students. This just might be a grant project in the making!