Archive for March, 2008
Dot, Kuwait
In the short time that we have been running the project, it has been interesting to notice differences in the students.
1 In Kuwait, most of the classes are segregated. I have two boys in one class that mainly consists of girls.
2 Some of my students are veiled, so that you will never see them in photos or videos.
3 It is also unlikely that any of them will produce a Voicethread using their own voices. If I have male classes again, perhaps they will produce videos.
4 The knowledge of computing is quite low for some of the students. They are not used to sending emails in Arabic, let alone English.
5 They love seeing their own names on the Internet, even if it is only when photos they give me are published.
6 It is very gratifying to see them mastering even a low level skill using a computer.
7 We cannot devote too much time to the project, unless we continue with work that is connected to their syllabus. Towards the end of semester, we will produce more paragraphs that the students in the other countries might find interesting.
8 At the moment, they are working on PowerPoint presentations, but I cannot upload them onto the Internet as they usually just cut and paste someone else’s work. I am trying to tell them about the horrors of plagiarism!
March 28th, 2008
Dear All,
this is just to let you know that finally the Budapest project is off the ground too.
As we are having (a rather chilly) Spring break, there was no way for us to create a Voicethread, so instead we did a presentation, which we have posted on the Showcase site.It’s just part of what there is, we’re going to upload the presentations as they get ready. I have embedded the presentation in the blog at Showcase, but have also given a link to a full-size version, but you can’T comment in the presentation, it has to be done through comments in the blog.
Please feel free to comment, and encourage your students to do so, too. I know my stds are really eager to discuss living in different cities.
Looking forward to your comments and views.
Best regards,
Tibor
March 24th, 2008
Tibor raised an important point in his recent email to us — it’s clear that moving to an online social (educational) network will serve us all better in the long-run. Obviously Ning is the ideal choice. Unfortunately, my District’s filters continue to block images from Ning, including the CAPTCHA that you have to copy in order to sign-up.
So, since I’m the “problem,” it appropriately is my responsibility to find an alternative.
Here are the alternatives I will be looking at:
Brica Box (it’s brand new this week and looks promising)
Big Tent
Spruz
Webjam
Snappville
Six Groups
Crowdvine (where I opened an experimental network for us a couple of months ago, and it looks pretty good)
All of them are free, and it only takes a minute or two to start a network. They all have most, if not all, of the same features as Ning. I think three of the main criteria I’m looking at are:
1) Are they unblocked by my District’s filters? Several are fine, though I still have to check on a couple.
2) Are they easy to use?
3) Can you easily embed slideshows and videos?
I’ll look at them more closely over the next month. If anyone else gets a chance to check them out please let us all know what you think.
Larry
March 17th, 2008
Kuwait has a lot of beautiful scenes and places to visit. You can visit the museums, malls, beaches and cinemas. Moreover, you can enjoy seeing and visiting Kuwait Towers, which are the most famous water towers in Kuwait. Also, you can go shopping in modern and beautiful malls, and don’t forget to visit the old shops, in the famous souq (market) called “Souq Al- Mobarakia”, which contains everything related to traditional life here.
Everything in Kuwait can be enjoyable in a different way and at a different time. I advise you not to forget to take photos of every place you visit here, because Kuwait is changing year after year, so you must memorize every year’s sights.
Kuwait Towers
Liberation Tower
Mosque
Kuwait at Night
March 17th, 2008
Today Edublogs announced a big improvement that allows much easier embedding into blog posts, and increases the number of things that can be embedded. You can read about it here.
Basically, now all you have to do is click on the code bottom and paste the whole embed code in the post and you’re done. I’ll be trying it with a VoiceThread later on Monday.
Larry
March 16th, 2008
We have uploaded some photos of Kuwait and movies directed by some of the students into the hands across the oceans‘ blog. The photos were taken during the National Day and Independence Day celebrations in February. Sara Ebrahim supplied the photos. We have some photos of old Kuwait in the photo section. The movies are in the movie making section, using Dvolver.
March 16th, 2008
Ronaldo has posted the first student project at our Student Showcase blog! It’s a VoiceThread, and comments can be left either by audio or text.
My students will start leaving comments there on Monday. Between now and then we’ll have a discussion about what kind of comments to leave, and the mechanics of actually making them. In addition, they are excitedly putting together their VoiceThreads. We’ll have eight or nine of them (three students will be working together on each one) that will introduce the students and also share information about San Francisco, where we visited on a field trip two weeks ago.
I’m still not sure if we’ll have them ready to post before we leave for our week-long Easter break a week from this Friday. If not, they’ll certainly be ready the week we come back.
On another note, I would just like to remind people you can subscribe by RSS to both the posts and comments on both of our blogs.
March 5th, 2008
