Looking for activities to do with your students?
Here’s a couple of projects that I’m watching that might interest you. Meanwhile if you know of any other projects that would interest educators – please leave a comment to share so we can all check them out.
Connecting Student Bloggers
Last year Miss Wyatt coordinated an International student blogging competition over 10 weeks from September to December. It involved 500 students and classes from 9 countries of the world who participated by writing posts on class blogs, student blogs or as commenters.
By the end many expressed a desire to continue so the blog Bringing us together has been created to:
- build on the friendships begun in 2008
- encourage more students and classrooms from throughout the World to connect with each other
As a student or teacher, you can get involved with Bringing us together blog in various ways including:
- Writing your own posts and/or comments in response to their posts
- Using ideas from the blog for your own blogging and collaboration projects
- Volunteering for your class to be in charge of this blog for 2 weeks (contact Miss Wyatt)
Currently Ms Smith’s class is responsible for Bringing us together and her students have written some great posts. Haley and Sophie has asked …what kind of pet makes you go YEOW!?, Sam and Michael G. have discussed things you look for in a friend while Brianne and Brittany made me very hungry with their cooking tips for after school snacks.
Students would love to hear your feedback! Can you tell us how is Bringing us together going by leaving a comment? (Yes – if you leave a comment I will visit and leave comment on your blog 8) )
Skyping Around The World
Silvia Tolisano (Langwitches) is coordinating a project called Around the World with 80 schools. She has written an excellent series of posts on this including tips for using Skype to connect classrooms:
- Reasons for Skyping in the Classroom
- Around The World with 80 Schools
- Update- Around The World With 80 Schools
- Map of Participants Around The World with 80 Schools
- Skype Connection Rituals
- We are Off! First Connection in Around the World with 80 Schools
You can also check out information on the Around the World with 80 schools wiki!
Strongly recommend that you consider joining this project or consider the concepts of these types of projects and how you might use them in your schools.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Would love to hear about other projects that would interest educators – please leave a comment to share.
Don’t forget if you’re interesting in skyping with other classrooms check out this page of The Edublogger and you can add your class to the list by leaving your contact details on this post. I’m updating the list again soon!
Image by Lady Pain licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike.
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It’s been over 7 months since the last comment, is anyone reading this far?
I want to tell everyone about PikiFriends. I’m a teacher full-time, and it’s my creation after years and years of hard work:
http://www.pikifriends.net
PikiFriends is a sophisticated online ‘penpal’ program made for junior and senior high school students and teachers only, without public interaction. The main goals of PikiFriends are to improve English communication skills (no matter what level English speaker you are) and to teach good ‘Netiquette’ practices.
Things that make it special:
-Free…
-Except for the excellent curriculum (the only thing ‘for sale’ on PikiFriends)
-Unbelievably safe for students (no contact info required or allowed to be entered anywhere)
-Very simple, intuitive interface
-Teachers have great control of their student accounts
-Students really enjoy using it (I should know, I have hundreds of mine using it)