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.

To listen to a few more extracts please visit our Grade 4/5 class blog at http://fionabeal.edublogs.org

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:

The Locket and the Chest

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?

This is Fiona Beal from Cape Town writing again. Summer holidays are here for many of you in the northern hemisphere. Lucky you! We are wondering – what sorts of activities do you do in your holidays in your country? Do you find the holidays too long – or not long enough? This is a picture of Grade 4/5 B in Cape Town right at the top of Table Mountain, a very popular tourist site. Here is an idea for something to consider doing in your holidays. Miss Ale in Argentina (http://yearsixale.blogspot.com) directed me to this programme called Etherpad (Etherpad.com) for writing collaborative stories. It is really great. We have had such fun with it in class, writing collaborative stories with four in a group. Do you think it would be a useful tool to use to write stories with others in the holidays?

How much do we know about the early lives of our senior citizens? What can we learn from them? Our Gr4&5B class at Fish Hoek Primary found that we can learn to blog creatively by getting to know our senior citizens better. We also found that we could introduce our senior citizens to the wonderful world of blogging for themselves. But most of all we learned that we can bond through blogging. Please visit our classroom blog at http://fionabeal.edublogs.org and view our Senior citizen’s project. (Don’t forget to leave a comment). We have loved doing this project. We are very excited about finding a great way of being in contact with classes around the world. Could you let us know something about the senior citizens in your lives? What do they mean to you? Did they have any particularly interesting experiences in their youth? What words of wisdom can they pass on to you? Perhaps you could even try a similar project to ours and see how it goes.