Education

Welcome to the Education Page, a resource for teachers and educators
 

With issues like the economy and unemployment close to the top of the social agenda, especially as we try to find ways to put the global economy back together, we hope you will find our site a useful teaching resource. We ran an educational competition recently, with schools and colleges having the chance to submit new product data to the site. For more details, please visit COOLXmas.org. 

If you just want a quick resource to start your students thinking about the world they live in, you could take the example of the US economy and visit usdebtclock.org. The numbers involved should get those discussions started pretty quickly!


How to use the site in the classroom
To start with, each student could identify a couple of things they own, or would like to own, like mp3 players and phones, and see if they know where they are made. The teacher could assemble a class list of products, to see if the products have anything in common. If the items don't have a 'Made In' label, the class could use this site in an IT lesson to look up some of them and see if they're on it. If they have things (not more than a year old) that aren't on the site, the teacher could join as a contributor and post them on for everyone to see- eg Pinetree Smartphone, KGH-9871, Made In Taiwan. The site shows results of searches with Google Maps, so students are also getting a bit of help with their Geography every time they use it.

We also welcome whole school projects, where most staff and students try to contribute at least one product each. There's a built-in 'Add A Product' section to the database, so it's really easy to upload information. There's even a certificate reward scheme for schools, according to how many products they upload.

For extra Geography, and some exploration of Green Issues like CO2 emissions, you could use the Google Map result on the site of where the products come from, and look up the country on the CO2 by Country section of the CO2 Issues page. You could then explain about containerised shipping (there's more information on this in the CO2 and Shipping section on the same page) and research and plot the main relevant container ports on the map, so the students could work out the actual sea routes their products probably took to get to them. The CO2 Calculator page has the links you will need.

This would give the chance to combine Geography, Mathematics and the environment by calculating which student’s collection of products travelled the furthest, or might have caused the most emissions. (For younger students, the idea of each person's carbon footprint could be explored at this point in a fun way. Students could make a paper or cardboard cut-out of their own actual footprint and colour it overall according to the distance their products travelled, with green for the least distance and red for the most, for example.)
 

Additional Resources
There's lots of material on global issues in the Resources page on the lower menu bar, with lots of links to articles to follow up, on subjects like outsourcing and the struggle for resources. If you're studying consumer products like the iPhone, or countries like China, you'll find lots of material there. The Blog/News section has further links and original material, including writing about Globalisation. The Electric Cars page on the lower menu bar has a look at some of the problems electric cars have to overcome. This article has had thousands of views, and been published in a leading electric cars website, at EVWorld.com. The Showcase section has lots of links to new ideas for products, to help get your students interested in careers in manufacturing industry. The Links section puts you in touch with recommended sites like the excellent manufacturingiscool website, and with the thought-provoking iousa documentary.

For more information on contributing product details, or how we can help link you with other schools globally carrying out similar projects, contact us and we'll get straight back to you.