Learning from the World

Educators can build young people’s knowledge of the world by looking online for international content. The websites of international news organizations, cultural institutions, and universities, to name a few, provide broad and deep resources on other countries and global issues. Some pioneering after school programs have begun to go beyond web research projects to connect young people to rich online global experiences. For example, many international organizations are starting to provide educational events for older youth in Teen Second Life, a virtual reality platform online. Global Kids, an after school program in New York City, implemented the “I Dig Tanzania” summer camp in 2008. In this program, high school youth in Chicago and New York followed a paleontology excavation in Tanzania led by a team from the Field Museum of Chicago, learning about Swahili language and culture along the way. Participants followed what the real researchers were doing through streaming video, asked questions over satellite phones, and then dug virtual fossils and assembled them together into an exhibit in Teen Second Life.

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