Wikis are a fabulous classroom tool

One of the Thinkquest teams from my school did their project using a wiki. The whole thing about Thinkquest is that there has to be a real world problem to solve and you have to think of a good solution to the problem. The project needs to be not only internet research but also consulting experts, field trips, experiments, polls, journals, videos etc all put together with a lot of thinking involved. Too often a project is seen by students as internet or book research, cut and paste of information, and copying pictures. I like the Thinkquest approach. A wiki is a marvelous tool for a project. Actually, I think wikis are amazing - they are like website but without the HTML headache! You can upload documents to a wiki very easily. I notice that currently a lot of teachers have a classroom blog as well as a classroom wiki. What a great combination. Parents can get the regular update of the blogs but also the display of work that is uploaded to a wiki. This wiki can be viewed at http://futuresavers.wikispaces.com/

Introducing Adobe Youth Voices to my students

My Grade 6 Adobe Youth Voices group at school

At the end of last year I was very privileged to be part of an online Adobe Youth voices group of 22 teachers from around the world. This was facilitated by SchoolNet in South Africa. For three months we did an online course with weekly tasks and a lot of interaction as we learned how to use Adobe Photoshop Essentials and Adobe Premier for editing movies. A great part about this was that Adobe gave our school the software and licenses for 25 computers for free! Now my task is to pass this on to my students at school. The idea is for them to make movies about matters that need to be voiced. One thing that has amazed me is how digitally creative our young students are even at primary school level. They pick things up just like that. One of the groups made a very thought-provoking movie this term which is what Adobe Youth Voices encourages - giving the youth the voice to express real world problems. Here is a picture of this particular team adding narration to their movie.

Latest global newspaper between schools

One of the things I love about the Internet is being able to particpate in projects with other schools. One such school is a Grade 4 class at the Lafayette Regional School in the US where they have a global newspaper project that collects news from maybe 10 different schools around the world. They put it into newsletter format and create a PDF. Of course Fish Hoek Primary is one of the schools participating. I have taken this PDF and put it into http://www.youblisher.com for an e-book format - to get an embed code for my blog. Thank you to Garrett Ferguson and the Super Fantastic 21 (as he calles his class) from the US for involving us in this project.

If you click on the image below or this link ( http://www.youblisher.com/p/118644-Global-newspaper-March-2011/) you will be taken to the youblisher e-book format.