I'm watching the news tonight, trying to understand what's going on in Egypt. I thought of our community here, and wondered if and how you are approaching current events there with your students. I did a search of our membership, and shockingly enough, we have no Egyptian members here in GEC!
I'm also thinking of my fellow Google Certified Teacher, Atif Hussain, who teaches at an international school in Cairo. I had the opportunity to spend time with him at a conference in Bahrain last fall, and I'm concerned for his safety. Via Twitter, he says he and his family are safe, but that they need help getting the word out about what's going on. He says that peaceful protesters have been unfairly portrayed in the media as thugs. Hopefully, he will join our space and share some of his stories. You can find him on Twitter and this is his blog: http://icttoolbox.com/.
That said, I'm curious about the following:
1) What teaching resources are you using? (My one contribution here is Larry Ferlazzo's extensive list of resources)
2) How can we help Atif spread the word about what's going on?
Replies
Hi All,
It's a taken a while but our students in Egypt have started a student website, by students for students. It's still work in progress. Their first edition was dedicated to the Egyptian revolution. You will find student podcasts, articles, videos, pictures and cartoons.
www.myhayah.com
I hope this can be of some use to educators out there.
Thanks for all your support. Esp you Lucy :-)
Atif Hussain
Events in Egypt, and now in Libya and across the Middle East, have really captured the attention of many of the teachers and students World Savvy works with. I want to second the resources from Larry Ferlazzo's blog, and also share some other resources our educators have been utilizing. You can see our full list of resources here.
Kelly KorenakWorld Savvy
During the past 2 days, we had snow days, but continued our school online. The students and I read a short article from Time Magazine and then created questions we wanted to know more about. They didn't even know enough to know what types of questions to ask, hence the Time article.
Now that we have quite an extensive list of questions. We'll just go through some of the links from Ferlazzo, but also look at CNN Student News and the Democracy Now! website. I expect the questions will lead us to look into the recent clashes in Jordan and Tunisia as well.
I have quite a mix of liberals and conservatives in my classes and we're used to being civil in our discussions, so I'll have some of the students find their own articles. I believe I'll be viewing all the video clips through my computer. Some of the kids 5-8 are still pretty sensitive to violence. Some of my students have asked about some of the people we've connected with in Egypt in the past as resources. I'm sure we'll make a plan to see if we can contact them to see if they're ok.
Today will be about just learning and asking more questions. We'll probably continue our Google Doc of a plain KWL chart, where we started collecting questions. We could also begin to post more resources and learning onto like a LinoIt or Stixy, depending on what the kids want. If we do that, I'll share that here. I know we'll be annotating articles as we read, using our Diigo accounts so we can divide and share the learning more rapidly.
We will be using this to segue into our American Revolution project.
Thanks for your support Lucy. At the moment all my efforts are being placed at updating minute by minute update from Tahrir Sq (Liberation Sq). My friends are at the Tahrir Sq and I am getting regular update from them. The update from them is different from what is actually happening on ground zero. I have been most of the night updating the twitter and my FB account to spread the word. We are also trying to contact the international media. So far had success with BBC and Channel 4 from the UK. At the moment I am staying a friends house and we are both hammering this all out to the world.
I will keep you guys informed. Don't forget this protest is a peaceful protest for independence from the brutal regime of Mubarak.
Atif Hussain
ICTToolBox
Egypt