Postcrossing Blog

We have mentioned before how Postcrossing as a school project can be a great idea. Teachers all over the world are discovering how to use Postcrossing as an educational tool. English, geography, culture – there’s so much one can learn through postcards!

Adriana Salim is one of those teachers and we are happy to be able to share with you all how her experience has been.

I am an English teacher at a public school in Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil. I teach classes to teenagers who keep me busy trying to get them interested and motivated. The dean of the school where I work found out about Postcrossing and here we are, the students and I, involved in sending and receiving cards.

I surely couldn’t have run into something more helpful! Everybody waits anxiously for the mail and the school mailbox is checked every single day. Isn’t it fun to learn English this way? Each student is a single user. They write and receive their own cards. Our enthusiasm has also hooked the Biology teacher who has joined Postcrossing with his own kids at home.

We have many projects at the school: theater, dance, environment protection, reading and Postcrossing! Some of the students take part in more than one project.

Before Postcrossing, the students used to swap cards among themselves to practice their English skills. Nowadays we realise that it’s much more fun to write real postcards with Postcrossing.

This is where we have our Postcrossing meetings once a week.

Our postcards are mailed to the school address. The mail is always brought by the same mailman. We go to the main post office downtown for stamps. We usually post our cards once a week at a smaller facility. The students keep their own cards at home in albums or on a wallboard. Now and then we display all the received cards at school.

This is our mailman delivering some mail and the school mailbox.

This is the board we keep the cards sent to the group as a whole.

This is the main post office where we buy stamps.

We once had a picture of the cards exhibition we prepared to celebrate the 18th anniversary of our school on the first page of Petrópolis newspaper.

As part of that commemoration a school postcard was created and is now available to be send by the students.

Thank you Adriana for sharing this with us!

Have other stories on how Postcrossing is being used on education? Then let us know! We love to hear about them.

On April 22nd it will be Earth Day 2010 and, in a time when climate change is becoming more serious than ever, it’s important to not let this day go by unnoticed.

Postcrossing is collaborating with students in Tuvalu in a very special event around the Earth Day 2010 in which you can participate too – and it’s really easy, read on.

But first, for the ones who may don’t know where the country Tuvalu is, here’s a short summary from its Wikipedia page:

Tuvalu

Formerly known as the Ellice Islands, is a Polynesian island nation located in the Pacific Ocean, midway between Hawaii and Australia. Its nearest neighbours are Kiribati, Nauru, Samoa and Fiji. It comprises four reef islands and five true atolls. Its population of 12,373 makes it the third-least-populated sovereign state in the world.

From all the important facts about Tuvalu, there’s something particularly important that you should: due to global warming and the rising of sea-level, there are predictions that in the next 50 years the entire population will have to be evacuated. The ocean can swallow Tuvalu whole, making it the first country to be wiped off the map by climate change! Isn’t that scary?

Tuvalu students certainly think it is, and so do we. Postcrossing is proudly collaborating with them in this year Earth Day to help spread their word about how important it is to reflect and act upon climate change. The project is called “Send Tuvalu to the world” and consists on sending 422 postcards to all over the world sharing their thoughts about Tuvalu. The students organized a painting contest to draw a special stamp to be used in all the postcards, so these are very special indeed.

How would like to receive one of these postcards from the remote islands of Tuvalu? We know many of you would, so here’s how:

Just leave a comment on this Postcrossing blog post saying you would like one. We will then select the receivers from the first users of each country until we reach the needed 422 addresses. There are many possible slots for each country, so be sure to leave a comment! We will then share your address with the organization of this event in Tuvalu and the students will send your way one of this very special postcards.

It’s really simple to participate. But also very important, is to be aware – more than ever – about climate change, what it is doing to our planet, and what we should do about it.

We like to see Postcrossing as a hobby for the whole family. It might sound strange, but it’s true that very few hobbies can be done by such a wide age group. We have Postcrossers of all ages and we believe it’s quite special that Postcrossing can reach everyone, independently of it’s age, gender and, of course, geographic location.

Today we have learned from a Postcrosser and its use for the postcard exchanges: Postcrossing as a school project. She is a teacher in a school which used Postcrossing as a tool for teaching geography and history to the students. We couldn’t be happier about this so we asked if we could share the story with everyone. Here’s the transcript of what she told us:

In my second grade classroom, we have been Postcrossing for most of our school year. Recently, our 100th postcard arrived! Each student, myself (teacher), and 3 adult helpers prepared reports about an assigned country from which we received a postcard. Projects from my class of 7 – 9 year olds included powerpoint presentations, dioramas, posters, travel guides, fact books, and more. Each student took turns sharing and teaching the other students about their assigned country.

Then last Friday, with help from parents, we had our party. We sampled food from different parts of the world, match Moomin and Miffy on-line, revisited our projects, and played a geography trivia game.

I want to thank everyone who may have sent us a card! This has been such a fun and exciting project. My class has not only learned about their world, they have learned that different cultures, languages, thoughts, and ideas are what makes our world more FUN! This project was also a very unexpected lesson in history. Other Postcrossers who sent us cards did an EXCELLENT job of providing information about where they live. Because of your information, my second graders know a wealth of information from all over the world. It helped sharpen their problem solving and research skills.

For the last day of school, my students will each take home a few cards from different countries and US states. They are already starting to pick out their favorites.

I will, without a doubt, do this again with next year’s class, and every year after that! THANK YOU POSTCROSSING for being the best geography-teaching tool a teacher can have!

And all we can say is thank you! And thank you for sharing this story with us all.

If you know of other interesting uses of Postcrossing, we would love to hear from you!