Ebola Infographics

After 2 days of non-stop questions on Ebola, I decided to stop talking about bones and muscles and instead, focus on the current issues in Dallas.  Texas Presbyterian Hospital is less than 20 minutes away from our school, so our students are very concerned.

We started today by answering these questions as a class:
What is Ebola?
Where did it come from?
How did it get here?

We reviewed the facts that we know and the most current information we had, which actually changed throughout the day as they announced they were moving the nurse to the NIH.

I had the students compare the protocols from the CDC and the WHO and we watched Dr. Sanjay Gupta show us how easy it can be to contaminate when removing PPE.

I then did a basic Q and A and we looked up answers to the questions we did not know or were unsure of.  I hope that I helped clear up a lot of misconceptions and fears during this time....no, a Texas town has not been quarantined, and no there is no such thing as an Ebola zombie.

Next we decided to take the Open IDEO challenge of "How might we rapidly equip and empower the care community to fight Ebola?"  We reviewed some of the posted research and tried to come up with ideas on how we can help.  Our ideas will be posted in the next few days, after we review and edit them.  One of my students (who is super awesome), already posted his idea.  Give him an applaud or comment!

We are doing some initial brainstorming on this Google Moderator to define our ideas before posting to the Open IDEO.  Feel free to add to the moderator, vote for your favorites, or have your kids comment on any posts.   You will need a Google account to comment and please put your location so we know where you are from.

Our next step is to discuss how we can decrease the stress that is occurring in our community.  My suggestion will be to create researched based infographics to help the general public understand the facts regarding Ebola.  I will recommend the use of Canva to create the infographic, but will leave it up to the student on how they want to inform the public.

If you students want to take this challenge with us, we would love to collaborate with you.  I will publish the best of student work into our class portfolio and link it into our iTunes U class to provide a large authentic audience.

Here is the rubric I am working on now -- feel free to give me some feedback on it!