QA Grade 10 Bloggers :: Blog

SEPTEMBER 17, 2007    

       Today, Mrs. Lindsay gave us some information on digital storytelling. She also informed us that in the near future we would be working on a digital storytelling project in which we would be making a video of our own along with students from other schools over the world from countries like Austria, Australia, the US and other countries. I am really excited about this and I am looking forward to work on it.

          We were also shown a video produced by a student from the International School Dhaka, which served as an excellent example of digital story-telling and also gave me a good idea about it. We have been given an assignment which requires us to research about digital storytelling, and I would use the following questions given by Mrs. Lindsay to complete the research:

1.      What is a digital story?

2.     · What makes a good digital story?

3.     · What Hardware and Software are needed?    

SEPTEMBER 10TH, 2007

        Today is my second day in grade 10 IT class. So far we have learnt how to manage our account, how to join a community, how to add friends and how to post a new entry. We also learnt stuff about del.icio.us. I am finding IT this year really very interesting and fun. I have decided to use del.icio.us for bookmarking all my favorite websites and eduspaces for blogging and for all my process journals.            Using these softwares is really very easy and they also make organizing things very easy. Though I thought myself to be a very organized person I have now realized that I could still be much more organized and systematic by using these facilities.  

hello everyone this is my first attempt of writing a blog on eduspaces.net

 

I love ELGG as it allows me to easily explore other ELGG blogs. One of my designated 'friends' Mechelle De Craene has a fabulous blog and an interest in technology. I found this useful post about Nanotechnology that I intend to use with my ITGS class next week after their exams.

In have finally managed to upload our class conversation about using ELGG as a podcast. For some reason I had technicla problems with archive.org (unusual) and decided to create a podomatic account.

Here is the direct link to the 'Grade 11 students discuss ELGG' podcast. I tried to embed the podcast into this blog but could not get it to work as an embedded file.

Check out my podomatic podcast page 'Flat Classroom'.

Also today I joined ELGG Spaces after finding out there was a free version that can be used with advertising and up to 50 people. From what I can tell so far the Spaces version of ELGG is different to what we have set up here already by allowing more than one 'space' to be set up under a person's name. This is a feature my students were talking about in the podcast. Having come over from blogger.com we have all been missing the facility to create more than one blog. Now that other teachers (OK, let's not exagerate, one other teacher) has started to use ELGG with some of the same students we decided the only way to keep the two subject separate was through tagging. Now, if they join Spaces they can start more than one blog.

I think we have come into ELGG at a difficult time (as free account users) as we are now not in Spaces but have set up blogs and communities that I do not want to have to start again in Spaces. Will have to think about this one. 

Technorati Tags: elgg, elggspaces, podcast, education

 It was a thundery and sultry afternoon here in Dhaka. We decided to brave the elements and get away from our desks for a walk. We have two usual walking tracks: By the lake that separates Gulshan from Baridhara; and the Baridhara park. The former is a nicely paved walking track along the lake, the latter a .3km track running around the edge of a walled community maintained by the Baridhara Society. Today we walked both. I wanted to share some images of our walk.

The sign leading into the main road to Gulshan goes without saying: No rickshaws are meant to enter!

John and the new mosque: three years we have been here and it is still not completed.

Building site workers: there is always a lot of building going on here and most of it takes a long time to complete. No wonder seeing as it is extremely intense physical work. 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Bangladesh rickshaw

It has now been about 7 weeks since I started using ELGG with my Grade 11 and Grade 10 classes.

To say the least I am impressed and pleased with the collaborative power ELGG provides and the ease with which we can develop socially and foster a productive and refelctive learning environment. 

Still in the early implementation stages I am encouraging my students to use the networking facilities of the software. They are choosing how they post, what they post and who they interact with. There are some curriculum requirements in terms of me wanting to see activity every week on their blogs and in response to others blogs. I also encourage them to interact on the community blogs set up just for them and their class/subject.

Most students are now getting the idea that they can post for private viewing, public, logged in users only or community members only (this is a little different to the blogger.com interface we have used in the past as well). They are also getting used to (at a slower rate however) using keywords and connecting via these keywords. This week the use of keywords has become imperative as I now have another teacher who has introduced ELGG to his students and started a community for Theory of Knowledge. Some of these students are also in my ITGS class. This time last year we may have asked them to create another blog using their blogger.com account, however with ELGG I see no reason for this. They can keep blogging chronologically and use keywords to locate postings for each subject. My colleague is a little unsure as to whether this will work effectively, as are the students. Let's see.

Other great features of ELGG are the ability to upload files and hyperlink to them within the posting and share them with others, also to easily find other members of their immediate community and beyond. I am fascinated by the tagging (keywords and more) facility. For example the tag on this weblog for Bangladesh reveals all those in the ELGG community who have the country profile of Bangladesh, my weblog posts in category Bangladesh as well as other users with weblog categories using 'Bangladesh'. At this stage there are no other people/classes using ELGG in Bangladesh so we have it to ourselves ;-), however the power of this community and social learning facility has amazing potential. I think I will podcast some student responses to ELGG this week and share them with you. 

Technorati Tags: elgg Bangladesh communitylearning

We have been waiting over 2 months for our new PC's to arrive in Dhaka. Once again we are buying DELL desktops.

This year we also recommended DELL laptops to our students if they needed a new device. We are content with what DELL can do for us throughout the school and find them to be generally quite robust and hard working. So, now we have 49 new PC's to unpack, configure and distribute around the school from PreK-12. The changeover itself is a logistical headache as 49 have come in but 40 must go out when this is all done. Forty old (4-6 years in service) PC's will be decommissioned and put out to a quieter life somewhere. Probably our local staff will purchase them for a very low amount or we may donate some to local schools and organisations.

As well as the DELLs arriving, Ramadan started this week. Most of the local Bangladeshi staff are fasting during the day. This means that they often wake before sunrise to have a meal, but then do not eat or drink again until sunset. At this time of year this period of time is over 12 hours. The breaking of the fast is called Iftar. Our IT Department, also fasting for Ramadan, are working heroically through 12 hour days, in a room that is feeling the effect of power cuts and blackouts that are affecting the continuity of the AC, in order to get the DELLs out to the students and teachers. They are to be commended.

 

 

I am a little cross as I just lost a long post here on my elgg blog....have not lost a blog posting for months with blogger.com so I have become complacent as to copying and pasting 'just in case' the Internet glitches. Well, I am in Bangladesh and it is bewitching hour so it is more likely to glitch. I am not going to be able to recreate the post in full, but here goes for a second try while I can still remember.

I wrote a paragraph about the need to hyperlink and how having a text book in your hand does not do it anymore. (well that only took a sentence this time!).

In my classes I promote and develop the use of digital tools. Here is what we are currently using:

• Blogs (elgg and blogger.com for personal and collaborative writing)
  
• RSS (bloglines for making the inforamtion come to us)
• Wiki (for presenting and collaborating and creating a subject knowledge base)
• Del.icio.us (for social bookmarking of websites and resources)
• Flickr (for online storing and sharing of images, see my photos)
• Protopage (for me to deliver tasks and information, for individual storing of ideas and resources)
• Writely (for collaborative writing)

I then went on to talk about how important these digital tools have become and how our one-to-one laptop program in conjunction with our wireless network allows us to work ubiquitously 'anywhere, anytime'. We do not have to move to a computer lab, we do not have to stop interacting and learning from each other at the end of class time. Our classroom walls are down, our vision is strong and we work independently but together on a common goal. My students not only consume knowledge, they also create it and they use these digital tools in the process. They also collaborate and use social networking online. This is 21st century learning. This is probably a classroom of the future. And we are having fun!

Technorati Tags: elgg Bangladesh digitalliteracy socialnetworking

Berno (in front with Mickey Mouse shirt) is the grandson of our cook, Bernard. He had a 4th birthday party last weekend. We were invited to attend. The family live in a two-room dwelling on the ground floor of a building that, like many in Dhaka, is not finished on the top floor. This is because, so I have been told, once a structure is complete taxation is to be paid.

 As the only invited guests we were treated to a wonderful Bangladesh meal with chicken biryani, prawns and vegetable pasta, salad and prawns with sweet potato. We had a bottle of Coca Cola and to finish off a large chocolate and cream birthday cake. As part of their hospitality and custom we ate the main meal by ourselves while the family stayed in the kitchen. The cake had one candle and we sang Happy Birthday, everyone had a piece but we ate ours by ourselves.

In between eating, various family members, especially the young boys, came in and out and conversed with us.  Berno's brother (in the purple shirt) is deaf and has an animated way of communicating. I am always impressed by the generosity of people who have far less than us. The willingness to share food, to share customs and to open their home to us was very touching.

The family have little money, everyday is a struggle but they are the lucky ones in Bangladesh. They have a roof, they have jobs and they have food. Their children have the hope of a future in a developing nation. They even have a computer which I was assured did work (looked about 8 years old). Happy Birthday Berno!