Education/Newsletter/February 2015/Serbian high school student advocates for the Education Program
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By Milica Žarković (WMRS), Ivana Madžarević (WMRS), Anna Koval (WMF)
Snippet: Lazar Simonović, student of VII Belgrade Gymnasium, advocates for education program to continue in his school.
This month, the Education Program in Serbia has developed in a new direction. In contrast to regular practice, which involves WMRS contacting schools about the program, this was the first case where Wikimedia Serbia was invited by a high school student. That student was Lazar Simonović.
For the past tree years, Wikimedia Serbia has had an education program at the VII Belgrade Gymnasium in Karaburma. Their geography teacher, Miroslav Markićević, initiated this project and, after a while, activities were organized for English language classes as well geography classes. Lazar was a student in one of those classes. He asked WMRS to continue the cooperation and offered his support of the program. He also made a formal request to his school principal, who had himself been a teacher in the Wikipedia Education Program.
In addition to participating in the regular Education Program activities which took place in his school, Lazar was also involved with the 2014 EduWiki conference in Belgrade, where he, along with a group of his classmates, wrote articles on the spot, during the conference.
In Lazar's opinion, writing Wikipedia articles is fun and great practice for further education. As a future programmer, he finds using wiki syntax a good way to practice his programming skills. He believes editing Wikipedia is not complicated and that everyone can do it.
Thanks to Lazar, the Wikipedia Education Program is now even more accessible to Serbian high school students, and hopefully, in time, writing Wikipedia articles will become as common practice as paper work for all school subjects - not just some subjects.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Serbia here.