Students Communicate Across Languages

Technology has enabled us to easily translate from language to language. A 21st century skill we try to teach our students is global citizenship. Language translation software and social network technology have combined to bring us Meedan. Meedan will let students in America speak with students in the Mideast on current events. How valuable could it be for a student in the United States to talk to a student in Iraq about the current war? Could this communication improve relationships between us?

Teach Social Studies Create a Better Citizen

Technology has increased the transparency of government. Students can now follow politicians from campaign donation to bill signing.

MetaVid is a video search for Congress. Using closed captions students can search House and Senate speeches by keyword, bill number, politician, etc. You don't have to sit through hours of video, MetaVid cues the video to the part you are searching for.

http://metavid.org/wiki/

Open Congress gives students a one stop shop to study Congress. All information is available on House members - committees, bills introduced, voting record, campaign donations, even who they vote most often with or against. Open Congress aggregates new and blogs onto its website as well as offers widgets to compare members or follow bills right on your own website.

http://www.opencongress.org/

I can't leave out OpenSecrets.org which makes it very easy to follow the money each politician is given.


We need to teach students how to better use technology to become better citizens.

Visualize Data

Students have access to almost unlimited data on the internet. Two websites can help students make sense of this data beyond Microsoft Excel. Putting these visuals up on a SmartBoard can lead to discussions making sense of the data and discovering patterns. The above bubble graph represents the most spoken languages around the world.

Many Eyes from IBM gives users a variety of options to display data beyond the standard line graph or pie chart.

http://www.many-eyes.com/

World Mapper takes maps of the world and distorts country sizes to represent data being analyzed. For example a world map studying countries where people live on less than $2 a day would make a country like China or India a lot larger than the US.

http://www.worldmapper.org/index.html