Richmond students partner with HUM to cover smaller Olympic teams

by Michael Bociurkiw

VANCOUVER (HN, Feb 18) - Agreeing that the smaller countries at the 2010 Winter Olympics receive little attention, Grade 11 students at RC Palmer Secondary School in Richmond have partnered with HUM to draw more attention to teams sidelined at the Games.

In an assignment which has clearly generated significant excitement, the students were tasked to research about a dozen HUM countries and then build Facebook fan pages for each team. Already colourful, informative pages for San Marino, Tajikistan, Algeria and Armenia are now online and gaining fans.

Said one student: "I feel like this is a great project. We all hear about Canada, America and China but none of us hear about Ghana, Armenia, Ethiopia and other countries that no one hears about. But they are still here...they are still on the world stage. To hear about these smaller countries is very cool."

For the students, Google and YouTube have proven to be powerful tools to find information about the small countries and their athletes. The RC Palmer School administration has also given the students access to a state-of-the-art computer lab to help facilitate the project.

HUM - Human Unlimited Media is the world's first, truly mobile humanitarian news agency, covering 116 mostly impoverished countries that are not part of mainstream media coverage. A sub-unit of HUM - HUMmingbirdz - promotes and develops projects specifically for children and adolescents, to promote global understanding and networking.

Watch coverage of this story on Friday, Feb. 19th on CBC News Vancouver http://www.cbc.ca/tvnewsvancouver/