Technology in our classroom

As we have participants from 9 different countries taking part in the blogging challenge, Sue Waters and I thought it would be great to have a post about the festivals and celebrations you have in your country or the area you live.

I know students in my class will have just had the Royal Hobart Show they could write about, students living in Georgia must have some sort of “Peach Festival” as that is the nickname of their state, Halloween is around the corner as well.

Activities to choose from for week 6

Write a post about a festival or celebration you have attended.  Describe the festival and its history. What was it about? Did you enjoy it or not?  Make your post at least three paragraphs long so your readers will have lots to comment about. Try to include links and an image with the correct attribution. If you don’t know how to attribute photos then use the link in the previous sentence. If you want help in finding creative commons images then check here.

Change your theme to have some sort of festival appearance. If you have a music ipod on your blog, make sure the music relates to your festival.

Write about a festival or celebration you would like to visit in the future.  Mention why you would like to go there - perhaps the snow festival in Sapporo in Japan. Find links and an image to include, again with correct attribution.

Remember: you need to have at least 5 links in your blogroll for the activity next week.  These links don’t include the ones that were in your blogroll originally. You can have as many links as you like, see Nadine’s and Ashley’s blogrolls – about 20 names in each of them.

Original image: ‘P1040369‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/98423201@N00/2264259907
by:

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

I’ve just been to Sue Waters post on the Edublogger and noticed 47 comments from students and teachers taking part in the competition.  One class we haven’t mentioned in a post, are those students from Ms. Finklestein’s class.  Many of them have commented now on the Edublogger post. Make sure you visit her website and checkout the students on her blogroll.

We also have a new country taking part.  Participants are from a grade 7 class in the Netherlands in Europe.  They have only just received their blogs and are starting out on the terrific journey that many of you began earlier this year.

Remember to pop by my classblog to take part in the poll about creating your blogroll.  For one of the activities next week you will need to have at least five names on your blogroll.  They can be any student or teacher you have commented with or are carrying a conversation with.  Students don’t have to be in the competition eg Stephie in Argentina.  If you have a keen interest in a topic and have found an interesting blog about that, include that also on your blogroll. eg cricket or NASCAR racing.

Original image: ‘Amsterdam, Holland 075 – The Venice of Northern Europe‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8991878@N08/2643180457
by: Claudio Alejandro Mufarrege

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

We are now half way through the competition, so we need to conduct some sort of review.  I would like both teachers and students taking part in this blogging competition to head over to Sue Waters special competition review post on The Edublogger and leave her a comment.

This week’s activities are all about keeping up the conversation.  I recently had a  teacher from Holland write a post about starting out blogging.  She included two links to my posts on avatars and introducing yourself. This meant she left a trackback or ping to my class blog. Some of you will have received trackbacks or pings when I have linked your name in one of my posts.

I then visited her class blog to write  a comment and check out all her students’ blogs that were on her sidebar blogroll.  Sofia, one of her students, then came back to my blog with this comment:

MS. W,
How did you find my blog? My teacher recommended your blog to my class, but i never thought that you would find it!! Thanks a lot for writing a comment though…
Sofia

In my class I have about 20 students with their own blogs. How do I remember their URL? How do I get to their blogs easily?  Well, I use my ‘blogroll’ on the sidebar of my blog below my flag counter.  It has a variety of titles – 2008 students, games to help your skills, our school blogs, talk to these students, teacher blogs, wikis to visit. On the blogroll, I link to all those blogs that I visit often or have interesting activities to do.

I often give you clues on how to do certain activities but this week, you are going to look at both a written post from The Edublogger which has screenshots included and a video from Edublogs telling you how to create your blogroll. Make sure your computer can use a flash player to watch the video. It has a .swf ending to the URL.

Once you have created at least five links in your blogroll, come back here to answer the poll.

Still got time to spare, then visit some more blogs or check out the recent posts.

Add a comment at this post about three people whose blogs you visit often and why?

Which was more useful when creating your blogroll?
( polls)

Original image: ‘Usapan & Nyanpan‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/48234367@N00/178219033
by: Jon Bounds

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

Since writing your post about poverty, have you or anybody at your school done something about it? 

Did your school take part in the STAND UP 2008 against poverty campaign?  I know my school did, even the grade 6/7 students who were on a bush walk and barbecue for the day.  I was in a meeting organizing next year’s timetable with the senior staff at my school and we all stood up when one of the students read a message about povery over our P.A. system at midday on Friday.

Please make sure you visit some of these blogs where students have written some excellent work about poverty both locally and globally.

 Amanda,  Lauren,  Kevin,  Megan,  Diogo,  Julya,  Bigfoot,  Edw002,  Hailey,  Norma,  Nadine

What is poverty?

The World Bank describes it as “…a condition so limited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, squalid surroundings, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency.”  This is called absolute poverty.  Nowhere in this definition is mentioned the income of the person.

Below is a list of those countries which have more than 50% of their population living on less than $1 per day: The first % is under $2 per day, the second % is under $1 per day. These countries don’t have the luxury of a government paying out social welfare or unemployment benefits.

Burundi

87.6 54.6

Central African Republic

84.0 66.6

The Gambia

82.9

59.3

Haiti

78.0

53.9

Madagascar

85.1

61.0

Niger

85.8

60.6

Nigeria

92.4

70.8

Rwanda

87.8

60.3

Sierra Leone

74.5

57.0

Tanzania

89.9

57.8

Zambia

87.2

63.8

Zimbabwe

83.0

56.1

Source:  Wikipedia

Yet many people living in industrialized countries including Australia would spend a dollar per day on lollies, chips, soft drink, comics or some non-essential item.  But we still have people living in relative poverty.   These countries work on a poverty line. This is the amount needed, per week, by two adults and two dependant children to supply basic living needs.  These are the poverty line amounts for Australia:

• 1973 – $62.70
• 1983 - $212.70
• 1993 – $383.90
• 2003 – $562.10
• 2006 – $663.10

Source: Poverty lines March 2008 quarter

Why do families in Australia need $663.10 per week to live on, while over 90 % of the population of Nigeria live on less than $2 per day per family member or about $50 per week per family of 4? 

What can we as a developed country do to help those people in absolute poverty?  This includes the indigenous aborigines of Australia.

I decided when I was in college, training to be a teacher, that I could easily afford $1 per day to help another person in need.  So since my very first pay check back in the 1970’s, I have sponsored a child through World Vision. I have helped children go to school, have clean water put in villages, allowed children to be immunized and helped women buy animals and plants to grow and feed their children.

Thinking about our schools, if there are 30 children in a class and 12 months in a year, if each child could donate $1 per month or $12 per year.  It costs about $360 per year to sponsor a child, imagine the number of children, families, villages we could start leading out of poverty!!

This post is part of Blog Action Day 08 – Poverty

I am reading 100’s of posts each week and am finding out the interests of many of our students bloggers.  Remember we also have some student blogs attached to class blogs.  So I wonder have you visited any of these students from Canadian and New Zealand classes?

Soccer fanatics – Michael,  Nicholas,  Goooglyeyes

Car fanatics – Blake,  Boyd,  Dude,  Ryan,  Jack

Singing and dancing – Chelsea, Becca

Music – Devan,  Haley,  Max,  Hawaiiangirl,  Natasha,  Millie,  Tayla

Animals – Brittany,  Conner,  Babybash,  Butter,  Candy, Lilmspiggy

Swimming – Sam,  Sophie

Video games – Daniel,  Kris,  Michael,  Riderboy

Skateboarding – Brayden, Freak

Food – Brianne

Outdoors – Daniel

Other Sports – Dominic,  Hayden,  Julian,  BlueJaysRule,  Caveman,  Crosby,  Fluffyman,  MrT,  Travelgirl,  Unit 666,  Alex

Space – Jacob

Sleeping – Mitchell

Shopping and friends – Babyboo, Pretty princess

Soccer image:  Original image: ‘Hand Of God‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71447254@N00/2508921097
by: Mike Stimpson

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

Space image: Original image: ‘totality bites‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/91256982@N00/1258271398
by: Jes

Released under an Attribution-ShareAlike License

Blog Action Day began in 2007 when a few bloggers started with a little “What if …” question about getting lots of bloggers to post on the same day about the same issue.  They began asking bloggers they knew and it quickly grew and grew.  That year, on the theme of the Environment,  20,000 bloggers participated with a combined audience in the millions.  The event also attracted support from the United Nations (UN). 

This year the theme is Poverty.  Bloggers everywhere are asked to post on that theme, so we get thousands of viewpoints, opinions and ideas, all relating to their specific blogs and audiences.  We hope that by starting a global discussion we can help bring about both personal actions and a raised awareness for global poverty action going on. Notice Edublogs is one of the sponsors.

Activities to choose from for week 4

1.  Visit the blogaction day website .  Watch the video or if this is blocked at your school, your teacher might be able to show it in a class.  If you want to register your blog, I would firstly check with your teacher as there are many non-education bloggers there who might then start visiting your blog.  Perhaps it would be safer to register a class blog.  But you can at the same website, copy the code from under the badge you want to include on your post.  You add this to your post by changing from Visual to HTML in the right corner of your post dashboard. Now go back into Visual to write your post.  

So what could you write about?

• How education helps lift people out of poverty
• What schools and student life is like in poorer countries
• What students can do to participate in social action

Look at what this class in New Zealand is doing with students in Kenya here, here and here.

2.  Play an interactive game about a village in Nepal and how they can try to alleviate poverty there. Relate this game to the girl effect video mentioned below.

3. Check out these websites with information about global poverty.  You might include some of these facts in your post.  Causes of poverty,  the girl effect video, Stand up against poverty, make poverty history

4. Possibly the easiest thing teachers/students can do is organise a group to participate in the UN Stand Up Against Poverty campaign that happens just two days after. It’s a neat activity that schools, classes, any type of group can do.  They register, take photos if they like, and stand up on the day.  Last year 43 million people participated around the world in a show of unity to ask our leaders to make changes.

5. Read the book “Dust” and look at these pictures.  Write a post about global poverty as it relates to this book.

6.  Use 3-5 images with creative commons attributions to create a photo story about poverty – you might want to use poetry to help voice your opinion. Check out these posts from the Edublogger with hints about where to find images, how to upload them onto Edublogs and how to correctly attribute them. These posts are mainly written for adults but Sue Waters does use a lot of screenshots to show you how to do things regarding photos.

In the last two weeks, you have been introducing yourself and your class.  Now it is time to tell your readers about the area you live in and your daily routines. For this activity, you will need to use links to take your readers off to other websites eg a map of your state or a tourist destination in your state or province.

To make a link, find the website or page you want to send your reader to and copy the URL.  Come back to where you are writing your post and highlight the words you want your reader to click on to go to the website.  Now in the icons above your post you will see a link or chain appear.  Click on this, and paste in the URL you have copied.  Make sure you set the target link to open a new window.

Activities for week 3

1. Tell your readers about your state or province.  Include links to map, tourist website.

2. Talk about your typical school day – how big your school is, what type of school, subjects you do.  Remember high school in Australia is different to high school in USA.

3.  If I were to visit your state, province or town, where would you recommend I visit and why?

4. Make sure you have a clustrmap or if 13 and older, you can also have a feedjit map on the sidebar of your blog. This will help you find out where in the world your visitors are coming from.  Clustrmap is part of the widget pack in Edublogs.

Map Image:

Google maps