New young blogger and writer

Her post is called Scribbles, and she has a way with words.I love Varia’s blog, Siberian Pepper.  

“Education is not about getting the piece of paper at the end; it is hopefully, a community and an exchange between people all yearning for knowledge and new skills. I plan to suck it up as much as I can, put everything in, run my hands ragged over the keyboard and look in strange places for inspiration.”

ePals – connecting globally

I was talking to one of our Indonesian teachers, and he asked about the possibility of connecting his class to one in Indonesia. At a recent SLAV PD, Camilla Elliott suggested ePals. It’s a secure place for teachers to connect their students to classrooms around the world, taking advantage of a cultural exchange far beyond the limits of the textbook. You can connect with classrooms either through the forum on the project index page or the search box on ePals’ home page. Through ‘classroom match’ I typed in ‘Indonesia’ and the age range of the students. There were many results such as this one:

I’m an English teacher at one of the middle school in Padang West Sumatra Indonesia. Our first language is Indonesia and Minangkabau but we learn English as our foreign language. My students are very interested in English and want to…

ePals is supported by project ideas and forums, eg. The way we are:

What makes me who I am? In this project, students will engage in a collaborative learning experience. Through email exchanges, students learn about the daily lives, cultures, climates and geography of children who live in other regions of the world.

The project structure includes essential questions, objectives and culminating activity. The 4-part project elements include pre-activity prior knowledge and context-building questions, an exchange of 4 emails with ePals, a presentation of information about ePals’ countries, and a reflection/assessment activity. Each of these steps is well supported for teachers with detailed suggestions, estimated time taken and links to resources. In the culminating activity, students create digital presentations about themselves and their ePals which reflect their newly found cultural knowledge.

There’s a project index
including topics such as The way we were; global warming; habitats; maps; natural disasters; water. Links to information are supported by National Geographic. The home page also includes featured teacher, video and forum, and top 10 ePals activities. There’s a running list of new classrooms that have joined, showing their flag for easy identification.

It’s a great way to use blogging for authentic communication and global connection, be involved in collaborative projects, use technology and build literacies. And it’s safe and protected by blocking spam, pornography and offensive language, and managed by teachers and administrators.

#18 Grow knowledge

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Originally uploaded by tsheko

I’ve planted my wiki seeds and I’m waiting for them to grow. I know it’s winter so I’ll have to be patient. Once the exams and report writing are over, I’m hoping to see the miraculous organism taking shape and increasing in size. My art wiki is in its formative stage. I’ve started the growing process by adding pages within topics and raising questions for discussion, I’ve emailed art teachers within and without my school, added a couple of artists and brilliantly creative people for a bit of spice, and it’s just a matter of time before the living organism I call my wiki starts to mutate. My wiki will be a classroom without a room, a global community of critical readers, bravely discerning correctness and relevance of information, sculpting information into knowledge. It’s just a matter of time…

In his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Will Richardson imagines the possibilities of the wiki in the classroom – students could create book report wikis, what-I-did-this-summer wikis, brainstorming wikis, poetry wikis, notes-from-class wikis, year six wikis, history-of-the-school or community wikis, formula wikis, wikis for individual countries they might be studying, political party wikis, exercise wikis… and so on. As Richardson says, wikis are ideal for ‘whatever topic might lend itself to the collaborative collection of content relating to its study’.