Blog Action Day: Climate Change

Everybody raise your hands in the air, and wave 'em like you just don't care! It's Blog Action Day 2009! This is an effort to bring attention to a given issue by asking bloggers to focus on a specific topic. This year's topic is climate change, which is e-a-s-y for me to blog about, given my new job. The World Leadership School's primary function is to educate students on the various issues they will soon face and encourage them to grapple with possible solutions to those problems. Climate change is the focus of many of our trips to places like Belize, Costa Rica and Kenya. My job is to help schools create year-round relationships with schools *in* those countries that are most affected by climate change.

Students at my school traveled to Belize last year to learn about climate change, but they also worked with students at the school they visited beforehand. Here is our class blog. We're going back this year and the plan is Postcards for Profits (the students came up with that one). We donated laptops to the school last year, and this year, the school is holding a contest for all grades for the best images that represent Belize. Belizean students are using MS Paint to create these images, and the winning images will be emailed to us, so we can create postcards and greeting cards from them. We'll then sell those at our school, but also they can be shipped down to the village's "market" (a small fruit stand) to sell for more profits for the village. What's best about this idea is that the kids came up with it themselves through a special "Marketplace of Ideas" activity.

Actually, what's best about this idea is that students came up with it all on their own, and are implementing it all on their own. That's how to empower a student to solve important problems! Go us! (Pat on back complete).