During
Ramadan and the Christmas period, thoughts often turn to those who
are less fortunate than us. Today, I would like to highlight a few
Internet sites where you and your students can make a difference with
very little effort.
One of the success stories of the web in the past year has been click-to-donate
sites. Simply put, you click on a website link and a donation is made
to a charitable cause. The donation is paid for by sponsors, whose
advertisements you see on the page. The internet site places a cookie,
an identifying code, on your hard disk, allowing you to make one donation
per day.
Click-to-donate sites can be a useful tool in setting the context
for discussions on issues of poverty, charity, aid, cause & effect
and so on. More importantly, by visiting the sites, you and your students
will be taking a positive stand on an issue. After all, our efforts
to educate are nothing if we fail to produce thinking people.
The most well-known and popular free donation site is The Hunger Site,
at http://www.thehungersite.com.
It regularly generates donations of over 2.5 million cups of staple
food per week. If each subscriber to Teacher Bytes makes a donation
each day for one week and gets just 10 students or peers to do likewise,
over a tonne of food will be donated. All Hunger Site donations are
channelled through the United Nations World Food Programme. Other
food donation sites are http://www.feedyourworld.com
and http://www.thegoodspider.com.
You can help children survive by visiting http://www.chernobyl.com.ua
where you can make a medical donation to the victims of the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster. By entering http://www.thechildsurvivalsite.com,
you donate vitamin A capsules to children, while http://www.thekidsaidssite.com
provides medical care to children with AIDS.
A website for promoting volunteer work in the majority world is http://www.thehumanitariansite.org,
while http://www.peaceforall.com
provides for the needs of refugees. Go to http://www.quickdonations.com
for a comprehensive list of click-to-donate sites.
Finally, Hewlett Packard Middle East is currently running a service
that allows you to send Ramadan, Eid and Christmas Greetings to orphans
in the region. The company will print and deliver the card for free,
with your message. Their site is http://www.hp.com/middleeast/egreetings.htm.
