Well, here in Cape Town, South Africa, the school holidays are coming to a rapid end – the third term makes its presence felt on Monday 20th August! Thanks to this blog, our Grade 4&5 class got involved in some inspiring collaborative projects last term culminating in three-nation stories written between our Cape Town class, Miss Ale’s Grade 6 groups in Argentina and Mr Millward’s Intermediate class in Canada. I am going to put a couple of the stories below, along with a video Miss Ale made to say thank you for the collaboration. (I found this on her blog. Thank you Miss Ale!) Does anyone have any ideas for collaboration this coming term? It is something that is really enjoyed by both students and teachers alike.
Miss Ale’s class in Argentina and my Grade 4/5 class in South Africa have been writing stories collaboratively in circle groups using Etherpad. I have been looking around for ways of presenting these stories on blogs using a programme other than Empressr which downloads very slowly or sometimes not at all. I came across Slideboom.com and am eager to see if it opens up more easily. (Don’t forget to use the full screen button on the right bottom). There’s only one problem – anyone viewing can download the story as well. Do you think this is something that can be abused?
Have you ever thought of putting a podcast of an extract from a book on your blog? We have great fun this week reading into the microphone. Listen to Gaiwhe (online name) from Grade 4/5 in Cape Town reading an extract from “George’s Marvelous Medicine” by Raold Dahl.
I think it is amazing that we can use blogging to do such fun-filled collaborative tasks! Miss Ale’s Grade 6 class in Argentina and my Grade 4/5 class in Cape Town have just written collaborative stories – we did all the Part 1’s using Etherpad, and they did all the Part 2’s. Exciting! (Miss Ale and I are just about to start three-way collaborative stories involving Mr Millward’s class in Canada). Does anyone have any other suggestions of programmes that can embed stories in blogs? ( 24th June: Initially the story was placed in this post using another programme that was slow to download, so I have redone it) Here is one of the collaborative stories:
Hello from Cape Town again. After completing our exciting Senior Citizens project (http://fionabeal.edublogs.org), we were introduced to the wonderful writing progamme Etherpad, and decided to explore collaborative story writing in class. This has been great fun. We put the Etherpad stories into Powerpoint, illustrated them with one of our graphic progammes and then imported them (of late) using Slideboom.com. I am including one of our stories. Just wondering – what kinds of programmes do you use to illustrate and publish digital stories?
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