'projects'
I know that a small number of us will be teaching for two or three months longer, but the majority are entering their break very soon. It’s been a great experience for my students and me, and I look forward to some new presentations being posted in the next few weeks and really look forward to the fall.
Most of the teachers who are presently involved want to continue, and I’ve been exploring if there are some additional ones who would like to join us at that time. The response has been very positive. Additional teachers in Japan, Greece, the Middle East, Argentina, and in the United States would like to participate in the fall when we start in earnest again.
I’m thinking we might want to start a conversation about what that next semester might look like in early August (I know Tibor has some great ideas!), though it certainly wouldn’t hurt if you’d like to start sharing your ideas now in the comments section.
Larry
May 13th, 2008
Here’s the excellent article the Sacrament Bee ran about our project today:
Burbank Students Use Blog To Learn English
April 10th, 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
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
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
Hello again!
Larry and I exchanged some emails today because I was having difficulties writing a new post here, even though Larry had already granted me an editing status. Eventually we dicovered what was happening: if we, editors added to the blog, log in through edublogs home page, we cannot see any of these blogs (sister classes or student showcase) in our dashboards. So we have two options:
1- Visit http://esleflsisterclasses.edublogs.org and log in from there. On the menu on the right, the last box is “meta”, and the first option there is “log in”. Once login is completed, you’ll be directed to this blog’s dashboard.
or
2- Log in at edublogs.org, and then come to this sister classes blog. In the “meta” section of the menu on the right, you’ll see “site admin” and “log out”. If you click on “site admin”, you’ll go to the sister classes’ dashboard.
I believe the same works for the student showcase blog.
I hope this helps!
Kind regards from Brazil,
Ronaldo
February 28th, 2008
Ronaldo, Annamaria, Tibor, Dot, Rita and I are all now registered as editors both here and at the Student Showcase blog. So everyone can write their own posts here, and post student work there. I don’t believe Gladys, Mona or Isabel sent me their Edublogs registration information, so I can’t add them yet.
We had discussed trying to embed each student slideshow as a separate post in the Student Showcase, so that it would be easy for students to comment back-and-forth. I posted a link to a video in an earlier post about how to embed a VoiceThread into Edublogs. If classes decided to use a different web tool, they could either embed it in the blog as a separate post, or post the link as an individual post along with a description.
I’d also suggest that the title of each post clearly identify which class (or country) it’s from. I wonder if the topic of the presentation might also be included in the title. I’d also suggest that the beginning of each post be “standard.” For example, maybe each post could start like this after the title:
TEACHER:
COUNTRY:
TITLE OF PRESENTATION:
STUDENT NAMES:
I’d certainly be open to something else, I just think it would be better to have everyone start the same way for identification purposes.
I’ve also added a link on the sidebar on this blog to the “Student Showcase,” as well as a link to the video showing how to embed a VoiceThread into an Edublog.
By the way, the “Theme” I chose for this blog apparently doesn’t allow the name of the writer to appear on the post. So if you write a post here, please put your name on it so we’ll all know who has written it.
Larry
February 26th, 2008
I’ve set-up a blog where we can embed or link our students’ projects, and where they can leave comments. I’ve called it Student Showcase.
People didn’t quite respond directly to my question about if we wanted to share our projects this way. We certainly don’t have to, but if we do I’m happy to sign you all up to be able to approve posts and comments there.
February 15th, 2008
Four of us have been able to post introductions. Ana Maria in Brazil just returned home from a long vacation, and is involved in teaching an online class on blogging, so she might not be able to participate with us for another week or so. But she is very interested.
I have also added everyone to this blog as an editor, so now all of us should have the ability to leave a post.
In this post, I’d like to try to give a summary of what people have told me in emails, along with my own thoughts. Then I thought we could just start a discussion through the comments section. Feel free to correct me if I’m not accurately representing what you wrote.
After I’m done with this post, I’ll write another one sharing ideas of how we might want to have our students communicate and what tools might work best. As I mentioned in my first post, this might or might not be an artificial division. But it helps my thinking, at least.
Since we’re all going to be receiving everyone’s comments, I can see that discussions on both of these topics could end up blending together.
Here are some ideas (again, here, there are probably some artificial divisions — most, if not all, of these ideas blend in with each other):
Online Introductions To Our Countries
Tibor thinks his students would be particularly interested in using this framework for a number of topics, including cultures co-existing, racism, stereotypes our students might have about the other countries in this project, and a wide range of social issues (women’s rights, music, the states of families, student rights, etc.)
My Government class will begin in February by learning about the major cities in California. They will be doing some projects related to that topic, so I’d be interested if other classes might do some similarly basic informational projects for exchange. My class will also, obviously, be studying how the U.S. Government works (starting in April), along with how people make social change. They’ll be organizing to solve a community problem, too. I’d be interested to see if any other classes would like to do informational exchanges around these two topics, too.
Dot has sent me a draft of a questionnaire that she thought would be good to use among our classes at some time. I’d like to post the file on this blog. I know it can be done, but I’m quite sure how. Does anyone else know? If not, we can just send to everyone by email.
Sharing Student & Family Immigration Histories
All of my students (World History and Government — a total of about 75 students) will be learning about immigration to the United States, and sharing their own family’s immigration history (they’ll be doing this in March). An exchange of these stories might be good. Rita has also expressed interest in this idea.
Sharing Important Moments In Each Country’s History
I’m interested in this for my World History class. Tibor likes the idea, and also points out that it would be important to incorporate student opinions, too, and not just do a dry informational report.
Conflicts & War; How & Why They’ve Happened and How They’ve Affected Student Families
The Effects Of Globalization On Our Countries
Tibor and I think it might be intriguing to see what different perceptions there might be in each country.
Tibor also made a suggestion in an email to me that I think is a great idea. He suggested that we pick a couple of social issues and each class create some kind of presentation describing the situation in their country related to that topic. That way it’s not that difficult and it can be sort of a “test” for our classes. Students can then comment on each other’s presentations (more on how that might work in the next post).
To further ensure success, I might even suggest that we leave the topic pretty broad for the first time. For example, we could leave it at each class makes a presentation or multiple presentations (I could see six or seven small groups working together in my class to come up with different ones) on whatever each of us thinks would be a good introduction to our respective countries and classes. My class, depending on the timing, might do ones on different parts of California (including sharing their favorite parts and why), or on California’s immigration history(including what they would have done in particular situations and why). Another class might do it on popular music in their country.
Then, if it seems to have worked well, we can move on to more complex projects.
I’ll look forward to hearing everybody’s thoughts….
January 19th, 2008
