All these tools help us learn and some of the ones we use the most are Edublogs and Moodle. In Edublogs we have learned how to make proper sentences and we also have the opportunity to make posts about our favourite subjects and post them for everybody to read. I can comment on other peoples posts and people comment on mine. In Moodle we have different subjects to learn from like science, math and social studies. It’s fun using all of the tools listed above and I’m going to use the writing skills I’ve learned from edublogs when I go to high school. Some tools such as wikispaces and skype will help me with my research and expanding my knowledge. I would like to know if you have used any of these tools from the list above?
Image: iPad with Dandelion By: JaredEarle Through Creative Commons released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license
It all started at school on a great Tuesday. We all got to school knowing at the end of the day we were going to the Vancouver Aquarium. At 2:45pm we all got in cars and we were on our way to the Nanaimo ferry terminal. When we got there we all waited for a while and then we left to Vancouver. On the ferry there was so much to do like the gift shop,cafeteria and the arcade. I went to them all. I played some video games, ate some food and I didn’t buy anything at the gift shop but I still looked around. After about 90 minutes we got to Vancouver and we got on a bus and headed off to the Aquarium. Then we got off the bus and walked to a park that was beside the Aquarium and we got to play on the park for about 45minutues. At 9:00pm we went inside the Aquarium and got a tour around. First we went behind the scenes and saw the machinary we also saw the amazon and got to touch otter pelts. We saw jelly fish, sea urchins and the belugas which we got to sleep beside their tank. At 12:30 we Finlay went into our sleeping bags I didn’t get to sleep until 4:30 in the morning and we then had to all get up at 6:30 for breakfast. For breakfast I had fruit loops after that we were aloud to walk around and look at the things we didn’t get to see before. Then we went to go catch the bus to go back to the ferry terminal. We got to the the bus and went back to the ferry terminal and boarded the ferry. I mostly did the same thing I did last time I was on the ferry I ate and played video games and that’s it until I got back to Nanaimo. We all got back and got into cars to head back to school and we got to school and school just ended when we got there. I was tired and almost fell asleep and then I went home. It was awesome!!!
In January, I made four New Year’s resolutions: one each for school, personal, community and global.
My school goal was to get more of my work done and get it done on time. It was too hard and I gave up but I still got all my work done but not on time. I couldn’t achieve my goal. I kept putting it off because I wanted to do other things like play video games and go to the movies. In September, I’ll try again to accomplish my goal in grade 8 except this time I’m going to try harder and and still try to have enough time to do the things that I want.
My personal goal was to lose weight and lucky for me I did. I lost weight by not eating as much junk food like chips and chocolate. I also started exercising like jogging and biking.
My goal for helping the community was to volunteer at the soup kitchen and I did on a Saturday a couple of months ago. It was fun to hand out food to people that are either homeless or poor and it felt good to know that I’m helping the community.
Finally my global goal was to cut-down on my paper consumption and recycle more often. This goal was easy at first but it got harder to keep remembering to recycle but eventually it got to be a habit… a good habit.
I think I did a very good job on most of them and I still have until the end of December to work on the rest of my goals.
Image: Fireworks #1 By: Camera Slayer Through Creative Commons
Paintball is a fun sport to play. I recently went to play paintball for the first time ever and it was a lot of fun even though I kept on getting hit. One of my favourite parts was when my friend was lying down on the ground trying to not get hit but I didn’t see anyone so I kept on walking. I started crossing a bridge but as soon as I got on the other side I started getting hit. The other team kept hitting me on my mask so I couldn’t see through the paint and as fast as I could, I ran back across the bridge and took a huge dive into the bushes. When they left I got back up and walked around some bushes and didn’t notice that there were the same guys from before except there were more this time. They were heading my way so I ducked behind some bushes and aimed at them. Unfortunately I kept missing and I think I only hit one person. Then the guy blew the whistle and the game was over so I got up and I saw about thirteen more people than I thought there were coming out of the bushes. I was completely surrounded. If it had been another 2 minutes I would have gotten hurt a lot. Every time you get hit with a paintball it stings a lot. It’s completely worth it though because it’s so much fun.
A Creative Commons license makes it so that if you make a picture or take a picture with your camera you can choose whether other people are aloud to use it or remix it. When you use a picture under a Creative Commons license you have to attribute the image to whoever it belongs to. Attributing means that you have to tell other people who the image belongs to and link the pictures name back to where you got the image from. I think that it’s a good idea for my blog to have a Creative Commons license so that other websites cannot copy one of my posts and use it as there’s I have had people from class and people I don’t know visit my blog and I don’t know how there using my work but if they want to copy it then they can link it back to where they got it from.
Image: Creative Commons Man By Mickipedia Through Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License
Earth day started in 1970 in the US but in Canada it has only been celebrated for the last 20 years.
Earth Day is a great day to show the earth you care. Although [this day] already [happened on April 22nd] that doesn’t mean you can’t still do your part by doing simple things like recycling and turning off lights when you don’t need them.
[On our Earth Day] at school, we went paperless. It was a lot of fun because we got to write on our desk and we were helping the environment by limiting the amount of paper we used. This helps save trees from being cut down. We’ve decided to make every thursday paperless and from now to the end of the year we will not use any paper during class. To read more click here.
I recently found out what my ecological footprint was. It was 6.9 global hectares which requires an area of productive land equivalent to 8.5 Canadian football fields. The Canadian average is 7.1. global hectares.
We need to limit the amount of paper and plastics that we use. We need to recyle because the plastic is ending up in our oceans and landfills.
At school we are learning about the Maori language and we are using Vocaroo to let people hear what the language sounds like. This is me saying a traditional Maori greeting called a mihi.
My school is doing something called an entrepreneur fair. My item that I’m selling is a pet rock and I want to know how I should make my item so I made this survey to get an idea of what most people would want the pet rock to look like.
The Wii is a gaming console created by Nintendo. Some people might ask why they called it Wii. It’s because Wii sounded a lot like “we” and the company wanted it to mean people coming together. The original name for this console was Revolution. The Wii was released on December 8, 2006. Most people liked the old idea of calling it Revolution but later decided to call it Wii. When it was released I thought its design looked very interesting and the commercial made me want it more.The Wii uses a wireless controller that detects movement so when you move, the character from the game that you are playing also moves in the same way. This gaming console was developed with a design very similar to another one of Nintendo’s products the DS.
I think that the Wii is a great video game system because it’s fun and it involves moving around and keeping active. My favourite games include Ninja Reflex and Super Smash Bros Brawl because they both include moving around with the Wii remote.
What’s your favourite Wii game? If you don’t have a Wii then what’s your favourite game console?
In class blogs, I think it’s okay if you put pictures of students in a post if you don’t label the names of the students. For example, like the way my teacher uses photos of us on our class blog. If you do put the names beside the students in the pictures it can
provide people with too much personal information. Once someone sees your picture and name in a post then they know who you are and that can put you in an unsafe situation. People can also remix the photo of you and you have no control over that.
Avatars help by letting you give out some information about what you look like but not enough of information so that someone could recognize you if they see you. They keep you safe and are fun to make.
These are some of the awesome 21st century tools we have used this year.
