Welcome to Panwapa

Today I stumbled across this website in my internet browsing. It's a fantastic resource, with loads of potential. I noted that there are already 116 New Zealand 'Panwapas'...

From the site's press release:

Elmo, Big Bird and Oscar are world-renowned, but it's their new counterparts, "Azibo," "Athena," and "Baabra" who are the focus of a new worldwide initiative. Children today are growing up in an increasingly interconnected world full of opportunities and challenges that require them to develop new skills and perspectives. To meet this need, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, and The Merrill Lynch Foundation have created a Worldwide Kids initiative called Panwapa.

Panwapa, which means "here on this earth" in the Tshiluba language, aims to foster the foundation for global citizenship and community activism in young children, ages 4 to 7. Featuring an entirely new group of Muppet characters, Panwapa consists of an interactive website, www.panwapa.com, a DVD, and print materials that are available in five languages to children around the world—Arabic, English, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish.

A team of international cultural experts, early childhood researchers, educators and media specialists from nine countries and organizations such as Oxfam, UNICEF, and the World Bank first came up with the idea for Panwapa in 2005. Multi-national teams from Merrill Lynch and Sesame Workshop worked with the advisors to develop content for the program, focusing on messages of global citizenship for young children.

The international advisory board, led by Dr. Charlotte Frances Cole, Vice President for Education and Research at Sesame Workshop, developed five broad educational goals for the project:

• Awareness of the Wider World: An understanding of the linkages between local neighborhoods and communities and national and global issues.
• Appreciating Similarities and Differences: An understanding of and respect for similarities and differences among the people of the world and the interconnectedness of the world's systems.
• Taking Responsibility for One's Behaviors: An awareness of one's actions and one's impact on others, the willingness and desire to take responsibility for one's actions, and an effort to seek ways to make the world a better place.
• Community Participation and Willingness to Take Action: A desire to participate in and contribute to one's community locally and globally, as well as a willingness to take action around persistent issues and work through them to effect meaningful civic improvement.
• Understanding of and Responsiveness to Economic Disparity: An understanding that all people share certain basic needs and disparities in resources affect individuals' abilities to fulfill these needs -- and a desire to address these disparities.

The website, www.panwapa.com, is the center of the initiative. The experience begins on Panwapa Island, a floating island that travels the oceans of the world, where children and their caregivers will enter the virtual Panwapa community and meet newly created Muppet characters such as "Athena the Owl" and "Azibo the Monster." Children will be able to travel around the world and visit with Panwapa kids from other countries, watch interactive movies, learn words in other languages, and collect Panwapa Cards by going on international treasure hunts.

"21st century children live in the global village from the moment they are born. The sooner they learn to think of this as a wonderful, fun adventure, the better global citizens they will grow into," stated David Woollcombe, Founder and President, Peace Child International and Panwapa Advisor. "I am delighted that Sesame Workshop has taken upon itself the task of introducing its young audiences to their global neighborhood: their experience and creativity equips them better than any other organization to ensure that young people all over the world come to view the global neighborhood as a cornucopia of opportunities."

Change the world for $15

A global publishing phenomenon about changing the world is hitting NZ stores. With over one million copies sold worldwide so far, the NZ edition, Change the World for $15 offers 50 simple, everyday actions to change the world that are easy for anyone to do.

It is the product of the global social change movement, We Are What We Do, that believes:
Small Actions x Lots of People = BIG Change

With simple actions such as Give Blood, Turn off Unnecessary Lights and Shop Locally, the book encourages communities to connect with each other and create collective change.

Action 31, Turn off the tap whilst brushing your teeth perfectly demonstrates the We Are What We Do formula: this wastes an average of 26,000 litres of water per family per year. By turning the tap off, the average NZ street could save enough water to fill an Olympic size pool every year.

I am going to link this in to the "If I could change the world" Ning project. Perhaps your class would like to undertake one or two of the actions in the book and share it in the change the world project...

Action Research

This year the teachers in our ICT cluster are undertaking an action research project. These projects can be either individual or group based.

Over the past week we have run a series of "kick start" workshops to help teachers form their research questions, start planning and research. We looked at how to use Google's advanced search function (lots of amazed looks here!), and talked about the "Deep Internet".

On our cluster website we have set up an area to support action research. One part of this area is our action research cafe, a discussion area where teachers can talk about their projects, ask for help and share experiences and resources. We have made this area public and would like to encourage teachers and educators from outside the cluster to join in the conversations taking place there. You can access the area by clicking here.

Already we have some exciting topics posted, and more are still to come. We hope to have many of these published and available for viewing by the end of the year.

Come and join in!