Edutopia

The first video I watched was "The Edible Schoolyard" and I was amazed. I've read a few articles about this in magazines but getting to watch the video along with it was really cool. The Edible Schoolyard is located at Martin Luther King Middle School in California. It began as a way to improve school cafeterias and what students eat, along with teaching students where our food comes from and other valuable life lessons. The garden is the central focus of learning at Martin Luther King Elementary. Math, Science, Social Studies, and Reading are all taught using lessons from the garden. The innovative idea gets students outside, doing hands on activites and learning through other methods rather than the traditional book method our society seems to favor. The extremely beneficial part of this is that everyone has a chance to flourish. Students that don't test well and learn well in traditional classroom settings may be expert gardeners. Working in the garden also promotes teamwork, communication, and generosity. This is such an innovated and remarkable way to learn.

The second video, "A Night in the Global Village" was pretty neat as well. Students take an overnight field trip to a remote area that is set up as a global village. It is sponsored by the Global Gateway Program. The global village field trip focuses on hunger, poverty, sustainable development. Students are selected to live in either a refugee camp, Guatamalan, Thiland, Zambian, or urban slum area. All groups, with the exception of the refugees, are given some necessities needed to survive, but not everything. Therefore, they must barter and borrow from their neighbors in order to have what they need to live. Students must work together to cook their own food, which works on communication and team work. The idea behind this is that lessons learned the hard way often stick with us, rather than simply hearing about them. In the morning, students have to chop wood and feed the animals to get the area ready for the next set of campers. From the accounts of the students on the video, this field trip really opens the students eyes to world poverty and hunger.

The amazing thing about having these videos accessable on iTunes is that even if you can't grow a garden at your own school or travel to the Global Village in Colorado you can pull these videos up with the click of a button and begin exposure to these subjects. Having these video's accessable for the classroom can lead to smaller versions of what these schools are doing. You can take ideas from other schools and begin to implement them into your own school. These videos prove what many are beginning to realize, and that is students need to be doing hands on activities to have a complete education. Providing hands on enviornments and lessons help every student learn, not just those that are traditionally considered "smart."

I think in many schools, teamwork and communication is considered a good thing but not necessarily encouraged. For example, a student that has trouble keeping quiet in class and always wants to talk may have terrible conduct grades and may be a constant frustration to the teacher. However, a student like that would thrive in an environment where talking was necessary to learn. In an outside environment that demanded communication between students and teachers. So often lessons that are needed for life, such as generosity, uniqueness, and communication are left out of school lessons. These are lessons that are taught indirectly in the classroom but have a much better chance of being achieved if students are doing hands on type lessons.