Well, not really, but it is an amazing image. Check out the newly released super hi-res NASA image of the Earth that just happens to show the location of room 162. Fun stuff!
Posts under ‘Exploration’
Live blogging event – Skype call with India Q&A
Watch this space on Monday, 8:15 A.M. Pacific time for a live blogging event. Room 162 will be video conferencing, via Skype, with two gentlemen from India who will be telling us about Indian culture and Hinduism. They will also be teaching us how to do some ancient Vedic Math operations. Students will be using this space as a backchannel to discuss the session.
Netbooks arrived!
It’s been more than a year since room 162 was vandalized and eighteen computers were stolen. Today, we received our replacements. Thirty-two new netbooks arrived and I had the pleasure of distributing them to my students this morning as they walked in the room. We are not ready to have the netbooks go home yet, but each student will be using them throughout the day and we will charge them overnight.
The new Acers are running ubermix and I’ve customized each a bit. As we are a Google Apps school, the default browser is Chrome. Several extensions have been added including the Google URL shortener, Diigo app for our class bookmarks, an RSS reader so that students can easily track their favorite blogs, and one of my favorite extensions, Readabilty to remove excessive formatting from webpages.
I decided to test my assigned network capacity immediately. I wanted to see how my one Airport Base Station would handle 32 simultaneous connections. As with most Apple products, the connection was easy and seamless. “All right kids, let’s try to break it.” They fired up their Google Apps accounts and began sending emails, creating presentations, forms, and shared documents, watched Animoto videos, logged into their blogs, and opened multiple tabs in Chrome. I even had a video Skype call with a student across the room. None of us noticed any slowdown. The network and the netbooks performed brilliantly. Next week I get to return to my “regular” lessons that include plenty of netbook time.
It was a good day.
RWC – It must be the hair
Victory! We are very excited to see that the Eagles have scored what is only their third win ever at a RWC. We’ve viewed the video highlights and photos and read all about the 13-6 win over Russia. We are having a great time learning about the sport from our friends around the world. Mr. Webb at Melville and his students made a fun video explaining a ruck to us.
We’ve had visitors provide further insight from other schools where the RWC is being watched with great enthusiasm. Lucas and Oliver, two SuperScoopers from Dunedin have supplied great information and we look forward to Skyping with them next week. Our new friends, via the blogging challenge, Dr. Schultz and class are following along and learning with us. Mr. Lane and class have connected with us from Ireland and must be extremely excited to see the Irish team beat Australia most recently.
The rugby fanatics, and new friends, from Hamilton East Primary school have jumped in and helped us understand the game better right alongside our Cloud Nine comrades at Russell Street School. We’ve also connected to Mr. Eldridge in the UK at Hawes Community Primary School and he has given us a different perspective on the game.
This has been a great way to begin our school year and to demonstrate to my students and their parents the power of global, collaborative learning!
A tough loss for the U.S. team
The U.S. National Rugby team suffered a hard fought loss to Ireland yesterday. The defense was able to hold the Irish team back for awhile, but consistent pressure eventually led to a 22-10 defeat for the U.S. team.
We need some help translating the game highlights from the Rugby News Service. Can someone tell us what a “ruck” is in the following quote:
The USA’s resistance was led by Todd Clever. The openside flanker was everywhere – slowing down Irish ruck ball, supporting ball carriers and piling up bodies on the side of the ruck like a man who knew he had to lead by example.
We are not sure what it means, but we have a few ideas. We would also like some perspective from anyone that was able to watch the match. It did not come on the television until almost midnight here so we only have the highlights to go on. The next match for the U.S. team is on September 15th against Russia.
Weigh anchor, off we go! oX)
The Treasure Seekers! (Photo by Ms. Judd)
Welcome to the first post of the 2011-2012 school year! We began school two weeks ago and have been VERY busy in “Tech Boot Camp” learning how to set up and manage our blogs. This year brings big changes. Unlike previous classes, every student in this group of 6th graders has their own blog. You can visit them by checking out our Blogroll.
We are also introducing a new theme and a new name with this class. We are calling ourselves the “Treasure Seekers” and we are taking on the role of pirates as we sail the globe in search of learning adventures. We are casting off the anchors of “traditional” learning and raising the Jolly Roger as we look for other tech-minded classes to help us change the world!
Please join us as we unfurl the foremast and head off to parts both familiar and unknown. We greatly look forward to learning from our sailing and rugby loving friends in Australia and New Zealand, our trading partners on the continent, the Jack flying privateers in the UK, and the adventurous Canadians. We also look forward to sailing the high tech seas with our land loving friends throughout the U.S.
Look for many new and exciting posts to appear here often as we document our adventures with digital learning. Each of my students will have their own Google Docs account and we hope to collaborate with other students around the world. We are also using Haiku Learning as our online classroom this year and will share our progress. Feel free to contact us with ideas if we don’t beat you to it. We love to Skype!
Final week preparations
I’ve apparently survived my exhaustive, yet exhilarating summer holiday and now prepare myself and classroom for the fun ahead. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward more to a school year beginning than I do with this one. I’ve made lots of new friends and have discovered so many great educators to follow via Twitter, Google+ and the Google Teacher Academy that I look forward to learning new things each and every day.
That will be one of our class themes this year. I hope to be inspired by my new batch of students and, hopefully, inspire them to learn something new everyday. Our second theme is, as you can tell from our banner, PIRATES! We will sail the high seas in search of fun adventures on our 10 month voyage together and look forward to visiting dozens of ports of call along the way.
To honor our learning theme, I present this incredible short film produced by Australian, Rick Mereki. Learn.
LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.
Guess Who I am? Can you seriously Guess?
Who am I ?
Can you guess my identity by watching and listening to the clues in the video below? I will present 10 clues to help you guess who I am and what I do.
The rules are: You can review the video as many times as you need and a week from today I will post the answer. Watch the video and comment on who I am. Have fun guessing.
Who am I? Chloe from John Miller on Vimeo.
Geocaching Update
Wow! What an amazing past two months we have had with our Geocaching Project. The students in Ms. Smith’s class have created a special page for their Dragon. Other bugs are headed to New Zealand (Trev’s Tag), Texas (Ramenstein), Australia (Kallista Jake), Illinois (Zion Mystery Sphere), and our latest release is bound for Kansas (John Brown’s Secret). You can keep track of all of our bugs on Mr. Miller’s Bug Tracker Page.
Here are a few statistics for you:
- Number of bugs released – 6
- Number of bugs awaiting release – 1 (bound for Mr. Webb’s class in NZ)
- Number of kilometers covered by all bugs to date – 22,351
- Number of miles covered to date – 13,888
- Number of kilometers covered by busiest bug – 15,851 (Kallista Jake)
- Number of students involved in our project – 200+
Frank flies this type of plane.
Kallista Jake is currently in the hands of a pilot! He has written to us asking if he can take Jake on some more adventures with him . . .
Whoa, ToTo, we’re not in Kansas anymore! How did I get here!?
Hi, all. Let me introduce myself. Currently I am the keeper of the Kallista Jake Travel Bug. I call him KJ. My user name is RangerG/75. I live in Southern California and fly for a U.S. freight company. I got interested in geocaching last year when my oldest son, Erik, introduced me to it. I’ve had a lot of fun caching and having the opportunity to do it all over the world. It’s been my pleasure to drag your bug around for the past month or so. I’ve asked Mr. Miller if I can hold on to him for a little bit longer and see if maybe we can’t add some miles and introduce him, and you, to some new and interesting places.
So, if any of you have questions or comments, fire away! Just remember that I’m old and that you need to use small words and short sentences. And, yes, I do speak Australian! I’ve had the pleasure to visit that great country many times.
G’day, Mates!
Frank
He is an instructor and has agreed to answer any questions that you might have. So how about it? Post your questions in the comment section.
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