2009/2010 Summary of Helping Focus Examples

The helping focus category of the Global Virtual Classroom Contest is to encourage students to focus on demonstrating ways of giving back to an area of need in either their local community or internationally.

Several teams displayed an outstanding helping focus in their websites. A few examples are listed below:

GVC09-16, winner of the Grand Prize in the secondary school category, lead by Anne Lambert, John Muir School, USA (CA); Lakshmi Srinivas, St. Mark's Senior Secondary Public School, India; and Hiroyuki Fujita, Wako Kokusai High School, Japan; designed their website around the idea of “Service before Self”. The site emphasizes organizations and individuals that have made their vision and passion in life. The site continues to focus on the students roles in service before self, highlighting KIVA, Flag ceremony, SOS Village and Social Services at St. Mark’s.

GVC09-01, winner of the Grand Prize in the primary school category, was examples of their website “Save Earth”. Students at Percy Julian Middle School, Oak Park, Illinois; St. Mark’s Senior Secondary School, New Delhi, India; and Washington West Elementary School, Olean, New York, all participated in recycling programs, blanket drives, food drives, food pantries, tree plantings, composting and herbal gardens.

GVC09-05, winner of the Third Prize and Exceptional Helping Focus Awards in the primary school category, was put into action as they wanted to do something to help with the relief effort in Haiti. The “Imaginary Island” team came up with the idea of “One Island Community Helping Another” and found the Haiti Houses project. Students spent their lunchtime recess creating pins from simple materials to sell at school functions. The team was able to create and sell over 250 Haiti House Pins to raise over $1050.00 to donate to the relief efforts.

GVC09-12, “Amazing Oceans”, winner of the Exceptional Creativity Award in the secondary school category contributed to the relief effort in Haiti. Point Option High School, a school of 75 students, raised $925 in seven days by creating themes for each day of the week, in which students could donate money to participate in. Themes included hat day, pasta and pajama day, cell phone and hot dog day and crazy sock day.

GVC09-02 team member Long Beach Middle School, USA (MS), , Second Prize winner in the primary school category, decided to do something to help other people who had experienced the results of a natural disaster. Students at Long Beach have experienced the disaster of nature with Hurricane Katrina and remembered how others had helped them. For one week, the proceeds of the five school based businesses donated 100% of their profits to the fundraiser.

GVC09-04, students at Oasis Charter Middle School participated in the Teens for Jeans program sponsored by Aeropostale. To encourage school wide participation, the GVC class designed posters to hang around the school. Students went from classroom to classroom and collected 297 pairs of jeans to donate to teens in Lee County, Florida and to teens in Haiti.


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Charles Elsey
Program Manager
Global Virtual Classroom

It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time

Like most communities, Warsaw, IN. has a local food bank to assist people and families in need. Students in the Glass Class at Harrison Elementary School wanted to do something special for their food bank, Combined Community Services. As members of Team GVC08-01, they were committed to focusing on kindness and helping others.

The students brainstormed some ideas and decided that donations of peanut butter and jelly would provide nutritious snacks for practically all CCS clients, especially the children. They started their collection. As the jars came in, the students shared their project with their GVC partners at Lincoln Elementary in Oak Park, Illinois and Petach Tikva, Israel. The Israeli students sent words of encouragement and support. Since Oak Park and Warsaw are only about two hours apart, the Lincoln kids decided to collect PB and J as well.

Mr. Glass seized the opportunity to visit Lincoln Elementary, collect their PB and J donations, and meet his GVC partner, Matt Kuntz, in person. Between the two schools, the students collected more than 200 jars of peanut butter and jelly. They made slide shows of the pictures they shared and Warsaw Times Union newspaper featured the kids in a front page article. Events like this helped Team GVC 08-01 be recognized for their Helping Focus but the real beneficiaries were the needy people of the Warsaw community.

See: Sharing with Others - form the School of Kindness GVC-0801 Website [news article is quoted on the bottom]

Stand By Me

This is a great YouTube Music Video that demonstrates the power of global collaboration and cross-cultural understanding and giving back to others.

SEE VIDEO HERE

I hope you enjoy!! Andrew Ezzell - GSBI Foundation

GVC 2009-2010 School Year

Projects exemplifying a helping focus and giving back to others is one of the judging criteria for the Global Virtual Classroom Contest. We thought it would be good to have a blog dedicated to what GVC students and teachers are doing to give back to or help others and to identify projects that other students and teachers can learn from and get involved with.