Technology in our classroom

Let’s go on a tour of some challenge class blogs.  Some blogs will have a list of students in the blogroll.  Please leave some comments on their blogs as sometimes they get missed when students are in the blogging challenge.

Mr Bogush – he always has some great topics to write about  – his students are all registered for the challenge as individuals as well

Mr Barrett – lots of images used in this blog

Mrs Yollis – lots of comments including from parents

Mrs Benjamin – only been blogging for a month

Mrs Manross – nearly all her students have registered in the challenge

Mrs Randall – very bright blog with student folios on the sidebar

Mr Baker – Fab4 have student reporters and lots of global connections

Mr Salsich – love the header

Ms Giraud – check out what each student is blogging about

Mrs Braidwood – check out their vision

Mrs Odom – 2nd year in the challenge – they exchanged ‘peeps’ with NZ last year

Doris – Venezuelan students learning English – check blogroll for monthly bloggers

Mrs Carrington – check out the class avatars

Mrs Smith (Huzzah) – 2nd year in the challenge – great posts about classroom activities

Mrs Davis – this blog run completely by students – maybe some comments needed to invite them to other blogs might be helpful

Mrs Burton – some great widgets, a superstar blogger badge and lots of videos about Web 2.0

Mrs Hogan – another blog run entirely by students who are listed under categories

Ms Cahusac – check out the Eagle Nest in Hong Kong

Image: ‘SRPS Bo’ness Steam Locos.‘
www.flickr.com/photos/26314424@N08/3657498431

Well, this is the official last week activity for the 2008 student blogging competition run by this classblog.  As always, at the end of a period of study, we all have to evaluate ourselves – Where did we go well?  Where could we improve?  I notice that Mrs Mirtschin has jumped ahead of me with some of her student posts about a blog. 

But here is what I would like to see in your last post. Remember this is all about you and your blog.

• Some statistics about your blog – number of posts/comments/visitors/countries/widgets used etc.
• How many comments did you write on other blogs?
• How has blogging improved your literacy skills?
• Your best post
• Where you have improved the most
• Skills you have learnt
• Why is it good to write with a world wide audience in mind?
• Check this rubric.  What score would you give yourself?

Now we also need to think about the future.  What is going to happen now?  The schools in the Southern Hemisphere are heading towards summer and their holidays – perhaps some students don’t have computers at home so won’t be blogging as often.

• Does another school take over and run another blogging competition?
• Do we run a new competition every ten weeks? 
• Do we open a new blog to young bloggers around the world with teachers as admins and interested students as authors, editors?  This way every school can have a week to run some activities. We would need to include a calendar to know when it is your school’s turn.  Do we include a form for students to register?

What other ideas can you come up with?  Please add them as comments to this post.

Attribution:  Image: ‘?‘
www.flickr.com/photos/26147864@N00/22489512

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

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

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.

As teachers, we have a responsibility to make sure you are being internet savvy and responsible while using computers and mobiles at school.  Hopefully what we teach you will also be seen in the way you use the internet at home or out-of-school hours.

One way of being internet savvy is not to have pictures of yourself on your blog.  So below are a few sites where you can have a go at creating what is called an “Avatar“. Remember though, that age counts when using some websites and if you are under 13, then some of these sites are not suitable for you to use yet. These are where you need to have parental or guardian permission.

Activities for week 2

1. Create an appropriate avatar to represent yourself.  Save the picture as either a .gif or .jpeg or .png . 

2. If using Edublogs, when you log-in to your blog dashboard,  there is a link under the section “Getting started with Edublogs” that allows you to upload your blog and user avatar in one easy step.  If you are a user like author or editor under your class blog, you should be able to upload to user avatar but not blog avatar.

3. Once you have uploaded a user avatar this will appear wherever you make a comment.  Make sure you have your blog URL correctly written in your settings and profile.  So from now on, people will be able to click on your avatar and go straight to your blog. But if your URL is wrong, you will miss out on some interesting visitors. 

4. Now create a post to explain why this avatar represents you.  If you are using a class blog, work with your teacher to create a post or page about your avatars. If you have saved the avatars on a drive at school, then your teacher could upload each of them as images with an explanation under each avatar.  Make sure your teacher also creates an avatar.

5.  If you created a Voki, then it can’t be added like an avatar.  Check out this site if you want to add it to your sidebar and check out here if you want to add a Voki to a post or page.  In both these posts, the most important thing is have everything ready in the post or page, including tags and categories before you insert the code under HTML and finally hit publish.

 6. Still got time left this week, then make sure you visit the blogs of other participants.  Leave me a comment here about some of the blogs you visited and what the interests were of the students you visited.

Remember the most important part of blogging is the conversation you begin and follow up on.

Any age can use these avatar sites:

• Build your wild self - top left
• DoppelMe
• Mini-mizer - top right

From abi-station:

• Iconmaker
• Illustrationmaker
• Avatarmaker
• Moeruavatar -  on my sidebar

If under 13, sorry you can’t register for these.  But over 13, need parental or guardian permission.

• Zwinky
• Meez
• Tizme
• Wee World
• Voki

Thanks to this wiki  which gave me many avatar websites to visit. 

Reminder: Remember if writing a post or comment, mention stubc08 somewhere in your work.

Original image: ‘reading‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16493883@N00/2628447075
by: tetsuo shimizu

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

A blog is all about you beginning and continuing a conversation with your readers. Because you can’t meet face to face (f2f), somewhere on your blog, you will need to introduce yourself.  There is usually a page called “About” or “About Me” in your sidebar. 

1.  Write about yourself or your class on your “About” page.  Remember though to be internet savvy.  Check out these sites for what to say or not say. Here are some examples of students and teachers who have already introduced themselves to their readers.   (Some themes don’t have pages, so you might have to write a post instead to introduce yourself or your class. )

2.  Any words in orange relate to blogging in case you want to begin a class blogging glossary.

3.  Why did you choose the theme for your blog?  Have you looked at some others?  What were some good or bad points?  Check out this post about the themes used with Edublogs. You  might want to write a post about your choice of theme or make a comment here at this blog.

4. What does your tagline say about your blog?  My class one says: Using Web2.0 in Miss Wyatt’s room  My class blog is all about showing my students lots of things they can learn or have a go at while using Web2.0 tools. Maybe you need to think about what your blog is about and choose an appropriate tagline.

5. How do the introductions of Sue Waters and Miss W. differ? They are both teachers yet one gives out more personal information than the other.  Why?

Was reading a blog which had a link to this site, which allowed you to put captions on your photos.  Sorry kids, but again you need to be 13 or older to use it.  I uploaded a photo I took of a bison in Yellowstone National Park when I was there a few years ago.

Have you found any sites suitable for the under 13’s to use which allows “phiddling with photos”?

Another great game from the BBC KS2 Bitesize website.  If you are interested in science, maths and language then this game is for you.  It is interactive in that you have to do things in a certain order before the games begin on each slide. 

When I first came up against these interactive sites, I nearly gave up in frustration.  Keep persevering and as a final resort, ask me for a clue to get you going.  Hovering until you get a hand to point at something is a great way to start.

I won’t add the flash player version here as it doesn’t load well in Edublogs at the moment.

By reading the blogs of other people like Larry Ferlazzo, you often come across a website that has potential in the classroom.  This happened to me today when I found a link to this site at PicLits. Naturally I checked out any age limits and could find nothing mentioned on the site, so joined and created my first masterpiece.

You are shown many photos to choose from, then can drag and drop or create freehand a poem or significant line to add to the photo.

 
See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

As we are doing work using the multiple intelligences, perhaps you could create a collage, with one liners for each type of intellignece.