Whilst in Belgium for the weekend I met a geography teacher and we talked about some of the ideas motivating us at the moment.
He told me about a brilliant idea where students from different schools travel to The Hague to join a student version of the UN - see here for more details. He had recently taken a group who got the privilege of taking Israel’s seat (each school represents a real UN country). The experience was eye-opening for both him and the students, seeing how they were treated by other “countries” and to reflect on Israel’s history. I was very impressed with this idea and think that it is a fantastic opportunity for students to understand the UN and world affairs.
We also talked about mobile education ideas and since I have been back he posted me a link to this site: www.radicalgeography.co.uk and in particular this article.
Tony Cassidy the guy who runs the site, teaches in Nottingham and has been getting Bluetooth education going for a while in a nice and simple way. Teachers and students are creating small images that have text overlaying a picture which helps re-enforce a concept. These pictures are easy to create with standard windows software and are made small enough to be seen on a mobile phone screen.
Bluetooth is then used by students to swap the images between each other. As we have seen in our interviews Bluetooth is used in schools already by most students for messaging and file transfer, so this is a nice way to make sure it is used positively.
There is no mention on the site about how successful the idea has been - but I look forward to more news coming out from there.