Summary: This activity prepares one school to meet another.
Materials: Wall map, ideally one that represents the world in the correct proportions, and one that is not centered over the US or England.
Class Management: Students might divide into teams to do this work.
Activity:
Explain to your students that they will soon be receiving a description from their partner school(s). But they might like to find out more about that country (and region of the country).
On a large map, locate the partner schools.
Research the Countries. Reseach could include the country's politics, language, customs, newspapers, net offerings and more.
The Web has many resources to help you in your search, especially those pages prepared for the Model UN. In the Model UN a class gets assigned a country and must represent that point of view. Research is critical!
country links- Model UN [http://www.thimun.org/research/countries/index.html]The CIA Factbook has the dry numbers, and Excite has a lively set of introductory ideas.
country links - ICONS [http://www.icons.umd.edu/reslib/country.htm]
A bit confusing, with links to government agencies and media covering the countries.
radios, newspapers, and media [http://www.thimun.org/research/media_a-m.html]It would be interesting to take a topic and compare how different newspapers cover the same event.
regions: [http://www.thimun.org/research/regions/index.html]
http://www.brown.edu/Students/Model_UN/research.html
Infoseek and Yahoo and Alta Vista are typical search engines.Search Engines that are particularly useful for students include Ask Jeeves for Kids, Yahooligans. They also include different amounts of advertising. How hard is it to keep in mind what you are looking for?
Extension:The International Center at the Concord Consortium has global links to augment your teaching. [ http://intl.concord.org/links.html ]
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