ejourney with technokids

The last two weeks have witnessed some really exciting activities. As both weeks are so busy, I am going to merge the two weeks in this post.

With the students

• Live blogging with the Premier, the Minister for Education, head of Telstra and Richmond PS
• Grade 4/5s were taught about Rich Wilson , the American skipper in the Vendee Globe world yacht race, by Lorraine Leo, from Boston, using discoverE virtual classroom software.  We used the new team board in the general classroom. Students looked at photos provided by Lorraine on Rich Wilson’s first two yachts, his current yacht, his provisions and how he packs his food for the 100 day, non-stop voyage and the gadget that converts salt water into fresh water. To ensure students stayed interested, Lorraine would ask questions of them and they would come up to the microphone and answer them for her. The picture below shows the start of the race, on Sunday 16th Nov,  from a little village in France.

• continuation of the blogging competition.
• Year 9/10s blogged a post on  their favourite part of Australia for sharing with Korean, Taiwanese and American students and on the presence of terrorism in their country. This came at a time when the Bali bombers were executed.
• Most of my year levels commenced working with scratch - great free online program, which is in easy programming format for students to develop their own games or animated features.
• Grade 6 students also wrote a post on how I should assess their blogs as report writing time is looming.
• We had a visit from year 9/10 students from Heywood to connect with my year9/10 students, share blogging tips and podcasting.

student blog of the week.

Congratulations to Rach’s blog

From a personal perspective

• particpated with Marg Murnane in the !deas 2008 conference, as our school blogging was one of 11 finalists in the national competition. This involved preparing pamphlets, posters and equipment for our display booth. We decided to take a data show and some larger sheets of white paper to project our blogs onto the back of the booth. This worked well. Screen dumps of our actual school blog bordered the projections.
• Completed an article for the Education Technology Solutions magazine on my journeys through web2.0. It was entitled “Blogging Beyond the Backyard”.
• Particpated in Talk it Tuesdays with Knowledge Bank
• Was host for Day in a Sentence. My challenge was for particpants to put the word “orange” and “star” into their ’star day in a sentence goes orange!’ Educationalists came up with some wonderful sentences on a variety of themes. Please read them.
• Participated in a really exciting live blog, using coveritlive, for the start of the non-stop Vendee Globe yacht race around the world.  

web2.0 tools to try

• vocaroo adding audio to emails. See a post on using vocaroo in google earth. 

My photoFriday

Making hay while the sun shines