How Can We Enhance the MCDS Experience with Kiva With Design Thinking?

For the past two months the fifth grade has been using design thinking to enhance the MCDS with Kiva. We had one class every week to learn about design thinking and how to apply it to our  project. We interviewed different faculty and staff about how to enhance the MCDS experience. Most faculty and staff either loaned once and hadn’t visited the site since, or only heard about Kiva at a meeting. We also learned that there was a lot of money that had been repaid in our Kiva accounts and we had not re-loaned.  Every group of two or three people had to come up with a pitch for their enhancement ideas. We presented all of our pitches as a fifth grade. Some ideas were to make a Kiva workshop at school where parents can loan and share Kiva with their friends and colleagues. Another idea was to make a Kiva gift card for the graduating 8th graders from their Kiva funds so that they can keep loaning after they graduate. All of our ideas will be taken into consideration by the teachers and they will choose which ones will be pursued.

Posted By Henry S

STUDENT REFLECTIONS ON GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP STUDY

REFLECTING ON THE YEAR

We are making an exception and allowing a teacher post on our student blog, but only to share students' words about what they have learned and how they have changed as a result of the year's study. 

These are just a few excerpts from our final reflection on being a global citizen. Each student wrote a page on it and they were all so amazing:

 To be a responsible global citizen you can’t assume what other people around the world are like and you can’t make stereotypes about their life.  You can’t block out poverty when you are a global citizen, you have to see the big picture and want to help people in need.  To make the world a better place we have to want to help the people in need and we have to dig deep into the lives of these people in poverty and not make assumptions.  We have to understand what these people are going through.  Anna


I think being a responsible global citizen means to use what you have, maybe money or a gift or talent, and use it for good.  I think it means taking those things and helping others with it.  Tess

The thing about Kiva was as we learned others benefitted from us getting smarter.  Amazing, right?  We learned about loaning and fundraising and the people on Kiva helped us with our learning and we helped them with their lives....   Max B


I think about my life a lot different after participating in Kiva.  I think about how lucky I am to have all the necessary items to survive like food and water.  …. Henry

My participation in Kiva changed the way I think about my life because now I know that many people don’t have what I have and don’t have the resources that people in America have.  And that I should be grateful for what I have….to be a responsible global citizen means to not waste your life on drugs or alcohol ….. Elizabeth

Since Kiva is so amazing I plan on using it forever and on.  If I can help people from just a click on a computer than I will.  It is not like I lost that money forever.  Kiva works on and on and once you put out a loan you don’t want to stop…. Kiva will never stop working…  Julianna


Being a responsible global citizen means to be just, fair and generous. It also means to be nicer to the environment to make the world a better place. Max P


I saw how much people were in need of something that they couldn’t get and that there are some of those people a few miles away from here that are poor and in need of a loan. Also that there are people that don’t even have good drinking water and I used to think that drinking water was easy to get and that everyone had it. George


In the beginning of the year I just thought that it was hard to get water in places like Africa, but now I know it isn’t just hard it is dangerous because the water is sometimes infected because someone used it as a bathroom. Harrison


The whole class benefitted form the study because not they also know that other people don’t get the chances that they have. “Talent is universal. Opportunity is not.”  Amelia
  

GREAT DISCUSSION

HERO STUDY

One of our big assignments this year was our hero study where we studied people who we thought made a difference. For mine I studied Thomas Edison.  Others studied Wangari Maathai, Nelson Mandela, Susan B. Anthony, John Muir, Steve Jobs, etc... We found out as much as I could about our subjects and wrote down the facts on notecards. After finding as many facts as we could, we put them into an outline. When my outline was finished I reviewed it and looked for the big ideas that made Edison so interesting to study. I put all the main ideas together to create my Final Biography. This whole process took about two months. Our Hero Study concluded with The Great Discussion. We generated ideas in response to the question: What is the best way to make the world thrive? We got into groups according to the kinds of work our biographical person did and took their perspective on what the best way was to help the world thrive. For example, as Thomas Edison I was part of the technology and innovation group.  But there were others in conflict resolution, environmental sustainability, and human rights also. We then wrote a little bit about our biographical person from our person's point of view. For example, Hello, my name is Thomas Edison I made... you get the idea. We wrote these for our Great Discussion to introduce ourselves.

On the day of The Great Discussion everyone in our class came dressed up in a way that represented their hero. I wore a suit jacket, dress pants, and a bowtie, all of which I wore to my aunt's wedding the year before. We sat down in our groups and the discussion began.