Peace One Day and Skype Join Forces for Global Education Resource

Peace One Day, a global movement that annually calls for ceasefire and non-violence on September 21, the UN International Day of Peace, and Skype (News - Alert) announced the launch of their first interactive Global Education Resource, an education program designed to encourage students to make a positive difference to their local community and the world.

Targeting 12-18 year olds, and free to all, the Peace One Day Global Education Resource is available in online magazine format, in the six official languages of the United Nations: Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Russian and Spanish.

Peace One Day also aims to provide resource materials to every school on earth, motivating a generation to become the driving force behind the vision of a united and sustainable world.

The program has been built on the strength of their U.K. and U.S. curriculum-specific Resources, which have been such a success that there are now over 5000 educators using Peace One Day Education Resources in these two countries alone, officials at Peace One Day said.

The initiative allows young people to explore a variety of issues, such as intercultural co-operation, global citizenship, non-violence, ending bullying and the link between sustainability and peace.

The program contains 13 lesson plans. One of them is a new ‘Intercultural Co-operation’ lesson where students share their ideas and thoughts about peace with other pupils from around the world, face-to-face, via Skype video.

The use of Skype video enhances the communication by enabling young people of all nationalities to exchange real life experiences and debate ideas, providing a window into other cultures and broadening the depth of their world knowledge and understanding.

Other lesson plans include the ‘One Day One Goal’ lesson which allows students to explore the unifying influence of sports, ‘Uniting Nations’ where pupils learn about the role of the UN, and ‘Great Peacemakers Like You And Me’ which allows students to reflect on their personal peacemaking qualities and their own ability to make a difference.

“We hope that the Global Education Resource will inspire and empower educators and students to join us and take on the challenge of helping to establish Peace Day 21 September as an annual day of global ceasefire and nonviolence,” Jeremy Gilley, the British documentary filmmaker and founder of Peace One Day, said.

“Never before in our history has this sense of unity been more desperately needed, but never before have we had the technology at our disposal that can enable us to bring it about,” Gilley added.

By partnering with Skype, Peace One Day aims to introduce three billion people across the world to Peace Day by September 21, 2012: people who want to stand up for peace regardless of age, race, nationality, religion or gender.

Skype’s role in this initiative is to remove barriers to how people in the world can communicate so they can easily develop real connections with one another, again, irrespective of age, race, nationality, religion or gender.

“We are pleased to be supporting Peace One Day in its mission to unite children from around the world and teach them about the value of peace and tolerance between nations,” Josh Silverman (News - Alert), Skype’s CEO, said. “We want to encourage more schools to connect via Skype video and to help Peace One Day achieve its goal of the Global Education Resource being used in all 192 member states of the United Nations.”

Skype is facing serious competition from the newly launched Google (News - Alert) Voice. In an effort to offer better video calling, Skype recently announced an updated version of its 5.0 service for Windows, TMCnet reported. The new Skype service comes with several new features, including the ability to make group video calls with as many as 10 people.