Borrowing Children’s Voices

As part of the Voices of the World project run by Sharon Tonner in Scotland, we have to complete a different task every month that focuses on using the kids voices. This month I got Grade 2/3 to lend me their voices to say numbers. Here is the result:

I got all the kids to write a number and decorate it. I then took photos of their fabulous artwork. While they were working, I took my iPod with it’s voice recorder attached around the room and got each student to say a number in English or Chinese. I put it all together in Photostory 3, which is a free download from the internet. I had to adjust the timing of the images so that it matched up with the audio which took a bit of fiddling, but that was all.

To see numbers presentations from other classes around the world, go to the Voices of the World wiki and click on February’s Task.

Wiki Support for International Year of Languages 2008

While I’m publicly thanking some of the commenters I have not contacted personally lately, I have found that some of the comments left evolve themselves very nicely into blog posts of their own. This post is based on one such comment.

Don from donosborn.org has started a wiki for gathering strategies and methods for supporting the International Year of Languages (IYL). He kindly added a link to my blog because I mentioned IYL a while ago in a post called A Special Year for Languages – and how all teachers can help.

Don’s wiki gives some info on the background of IYL , including some official UN documents, some activities and projects and approaches to supporting IYL. He also alerted me to the fact that there is a Facebook group for IYL, which I joined.

The IYL wiki is definitely worth checking out. It remind me that I’ve got to get some IYL activities happening at school. Any suggestions? What are you doing in your school to promote it? If any of you want to work together on something let me know!

Twittervention!

Someone twittered this today (I tried to go back and find who but it was taking too long), and I think it is going around the Twittersphere a bit.

Top 10 Signs You Might Need a “Twittervention.” Found at Logic + Emotion.

1. You type “@” before names in e-mail, blog comments and data fields.

2. Your written communications have become extremely short. 140 characters or less.

3. You change your Twitter avatar at least 3-5 times a week.

4. You don’t use your phone to make calls anymore.

5. Your blog hasn’t been updated in weeks/months.

6. You check your Twitter account daily/hourly to see if you have new “followers”.

7. New followers = euphoria while no new followers sets off mild depression.

8. You tell your friends to just “Twitter it” to you.

9. You experience panic attacks if Twitter is down for more than an hour.

10. You experience “Twitter remorse” due to having a high number of updates, but still can’t stop doing it.

http://twitter.com/home
Thankfully I only exhibit one of these symptoms – number 1. I get the euphoria (or slight ego boost shall we say) when I get new followers, but am not yet at the stage that I think about people not following me, if that makes sense. I guess I may not be suffering from any of these other symptoms yet as I don’t rely on Twitter as much as others do. I could understand some of these points for those of whom Twitter is deeply embedded in their daily networking. The network that is Twitter is amazing and enticing. Once could spend as much time as one likes twittering around!

You may notice that some of my posts here are daily digests of my ‘tweets.’ That is due to a cool new function of Twitter Tools that is part of Edublogs. Twitter Tools also lets me send tweets from my sidebar. Very cool.

I’m jessmcculloch on Twitter.

Anyway, I must away. It is past my bedtime!

Blogging Question 2: Why would I use blogs with my students?

The best thing about blogs is that it gives your students an authentic audience for their work and reflections. Rather than doing a piece of writing and only having the teacher read it, posting it on a blog allows people all over the world to read it and comment on it – and they do! Clustr Maps and other statistics sites show you where people are reading your blog from and how many people have visited your site. What better reason for kids to make sure their work is correct and understandable – they can see that (possibly) hundreds of people have seen it.

A great thing about having an authentic audience is that it creates authentic conversations. A blog is definitely not supposed to be a one-way authority on anything. The idea of the comment functions on blogs is to continue the conversation above and beyond what a writer has written in a post. Comments add to posts and allow for many people to voice their opinions about what you have written. It’s a great way for students to post work and then get feedback on that work – no matter what language it is in, there will be an audience. The potential for interaction on a blogsite is incredible.

Here’s a great video made by Frieda Foxworth which gives the top ten reasons to blog with your students.

Rachel Boyd from New Zealand has also put together a video on why we should let our students blog. It’s worth checking out:

 

Those of you who already blog, reasons have you got for why you blog with students? Leave a comment to show how the conversation can grow! Thanks :-)

My Day in the Twittersphere 2008-02-26

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