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Students to participate in global program
(by Walt Brown - December 26, 2007)
Students enrolled in the Public Policy classes at Pascack Hills and
Pascack
Valley , taught by Brooks Alexander and Jeff Jasper respectively, will soon be communicating on secure work stations with students at five English speaking schools in Uganda, two in Ethiopia, and one in Germany.
The German school piloted the program, “Project Inkwell,” and has brought it into the global educational arena with the help of UNICEF, whose volunteers demonstrated the program to the Pascack Valley Regional Board of Education Dec. 17.
The program will employ “wikis,” which are shared work stations that are the size of an iPod, but have still and video camera, cell phone, and Internet adaptations, while being data-enhanced by Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia company – hence the name, “Wikis.”
Regional Social Studies Coordinator Joe Orlak said the program will bring together students from the three cited countries, as well as local students in the regional district.
“We’re looking specifically, and focusing totally, at health care issues – issues that children face in
New Jersey. We will share the situation of youth health care as we know it, to Germany, where it will be easily understood, but also with Uganda, where the very idea of health insurance is, literally, ‘foreign.’ The data and images collected on the wikis will be uploaded into computers at our schools, and sent securely via the Internet. It will be received by the cooperating schools in the three nations to the extent that they have computers in their schools.”
Orlak spoke in great detail about the obvious differences in youth health care, and how it is a “public policy” concern here in the United States and is also a concern to greater or lesser degrees in the countries brought into the program by UNICEF.
Students in the regional district will begin the data sharing in late January, and Orlak anticipates reporting back to the Board of Education in late spring regarding the success of the program and its possible continuation or perhaps extension. UNICEF will assist with the outreach portion of the program so
Pascack
Valley does not have to recruit new nations for such an educational link up.
E-mail: pvcommunitylife@northjersey.com
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