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Touchable Earth

Touchable Earth is the first app where kids teach kids about the world

Touchable Earth promotes tolerance in gender, culture, and identity. It includes 100s of first person videos of elementary aged kids around the world sharing aspects of their lives. These include facts about where they live, their school day, games they play, culture and family. An equal number of videos are presented by girls as boys.

Shortlisted

Overview

HundrED shortlisted this innovation

HundrED has shortlisted this innovation to one of its innovation collections. The information on this page has been checked by HundrED.

Web presence

2012

Established

-

Children

18

Countries
Updated
August 2018
"The kind of change Touchable Earth makes possible could not be more urgent and critical. It is essential for Peace and Sustainability. School systems around the world have embraced an approach to improvement that is excessively focused on the development of a narrow range of cognitive skills: literacy, numeracy and science. Important as those are they miss the mark. What schools most urgently need is not to get better at achieving the goals of the past, it is to stay relevant in helping students gain the skills that enable them to invent the future, and to do it in a way that appropriately address the challenges of our times."

About the innovation

Sharing the kids eye view of the world

Touchable Earth promotes tolerance and inspires a positive sense of purpose in young people. Touchable Earth plays on the natural curiosity of children to capture their attention and subtly plants values of tolerance into their minds. It does this in 3 key ways.

1. Challenging the definition of 'us' and 'them'. Touchable Earth presents diversity as part of 'us' rather than 'them'. It normalises being taught by people of different cultures, races and genders (an equal amount of all content is presented by girls which is a rarity given what I have seen through the worlds classrooms). This means that later in life it is less likely someone will discount or dilute an idea or solution based on the characteristics of the presenter.

2. It encourages asking different questions. Kids using Touchable Earth immediately see the similarities between people, once the similarities are established as a bridge then the differences can be studied in a positive way.

3. Broadening the answers: The world cannot be explained with answers in statistics. If you asked a student 'what is a family in Marshall Islands like', for example, Google only shows a high birth rate and low income. Touchable Earth shows a loving family, a mother that helps with homework and a dad who works and loves his children. That content does not exist anywhere else. This app humanises places rather than thinking of them as a desert, or mountain or some other characteristic. These factors combine to prepare children for a lifetime of learning. They learn to view anyone as a potential teacher as they have learned from so many people at that critical age.


Implementation steps

Start clicking..

The program is free to use and easy to navigate on any device.

www.touchableearth.org/places

We are in the process of finalizing teaching resources to help teachers get started with the program.

Spread of the innovation

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