Edu4hazards.org now available in Chinese

Following the success of translating the entire site into Spanish and in an effort to cover the major written languages of the world, www.edu4hazards.org is now also available in Chinese (simplified). While you may also notice that this site has had a redesign, so has http://edu4drr.ning.com which I have done in an effort to get members to do the same! I want member sto use the site more and I thought that if I 'pimped' the site, they might do the same thing!

Effective Education for DRR - It's NOT Rocket Science...

This short video shows what can be done by teachers to initiate effective education for DRR in schools and the communities around them. These are VERY young children and yet thay are learning how to respond, where the hazards are in their area, how to avoid them and where the safe places are to evacuate to. They make their OWN hazard maps and share these with their pers and with adults. They are NOT scared or scarred by this experience, but they do LEARN and DISCOVER. According to proponents of experiential learning this will also perform part of a cycle where the children will reflect on what they have learned and apply it to a similar learning experience in the future. So what is MOST important is that great initiatives, lessons and learning are built upon and revisited in just a creative a way. Examples like this are inpiring to me as both a teacher and researcher of effective education for DRR and I wanted to share it with you. BY the way the original video of this was longer but I have edited out some of this in order to keep the important and simple message this film has to offer. The original film was made by the Insurers of Japan.

www.edu4hazards.org in Spanish

My edu4hazards site is now completely translated into Spanish. It took me about ten hours to change all the graphics in photoshop and edit and upload all of the html files. I have even changed the META tags so that someone searching on google in a Spanish speaking country will be able to find it! Pretty tiring but I am PLEASED with the results. Next I plan to translate into simplified Chinese using google translate! And talking of translating websites, I now have a clever little series of flags on the edu4drr.ning.com site which when pressed translates the entire site using google translate! I have to say having used google translate it is pretty good. However you really have to read through careully as any 'untranslatable' words stay in English. The trick the is to rephrase it slightly and then cross-check by translating back from Spanish to English (in this instance)