I had an amazing time with some incredible educators and other folks yesterday at the San Jorge School in Miraflores, Peru. (spanish version here)
We are working on a pretty great new collaborative project that is taking a design-based approach, so lots of great brainstorming on essential questions. Look for updates on that here soon.
I wanted to publically thank the folks at San Jorge for such a fun time together chatting, sharing, and tell them how much I love their enthusiasm for learning!
Something else that blew my mind was meeting with some of the students. They have a blog about pencils.
Yup, pencils.
They design pencils and make great little toppers, and then sell them for somewhere around 7 to 8 nuevo soles (exchange rate right now is $1 USD to 3.15 PEN so that works out to a bit less than $2.25 on the lower end). The proceeds go to support their involvement in Junior Achievement Peru. They are super excited about the pencils and the opportunities they provide. I think my students and I might help them out a bit, we’ll see.
I asked the kids to figure out how much it would be to ship pencils to the United States, and they need to consider blogging in English (since they all speak it!) to expand the boundaries.
The conversation turned really fun when Lucy offered up this salient comment which I can only paraphrase by saying, “there just are no borders any more”.
I probably don’t do the comment justice, but the profundity stands on it’s own. Maybe a good title for the project we’re developing would be “Learning without Borders”. Just a thought.
Thanks for everything, San Jorge! Here’s to developing new relationships in the days/weeks/months/years to come.
Update: Here are all my pictures from San Jorge on flickr.
Chris: How fantastic you got a chance to work with students in Peru. I love their pencil blog, but even more their creative moneymaker! Awesome! I traveled to Peru for a week in 1990 just prior to the elections there. I love the people and the country. So glad you had a good experience there, I hope you’ll share more!