This is really amazing but our class blog has been nominated for the Best Class Blog in the 2008 Edublog Awards! I personally think that it is all of the student blogs that are linked here that are the real attraction - and this nomination is recognition of that effort. And yes, you, your family and friends can head over to the Awards site and cast a vote. Well done, Learning Area 20. What a great way to wind up the year.
Today at assembly, we staged the first annual LA20 Blog Awards, commonly known as the “Blogies” to celebrate the achievements of our classroom blogging program. This has gone far better than I could have expected and it was only fitting that we recognise the students who have helped build our small online learning community. So, who won?
I also gave out four Community Spirit awards for students who did not win an award but who I felt had made significant contributions to the class blogging program. Well done to Kostas11, Danni16, Floppyj and Anast for their community spirit.
A big thank you to all LA20 students and the good news is that all blogs will continue into 2009 even in your new classes.
The class have been publishing their responses to the question “What’s Unique About Being Australian?” and I posted an invitation to the wider edublogger community on twitter to comment on the first few completed from alex008, danni16 and anast. They were lucky enough to receive brilliant comments from Canadian teacher, Chris Harbeck, Anne Mirtschin from Victoria and the always wonderful Rose G. (Who I’ve met in person last year here in Adelaide!) danni17 also received a comment from Lani Hall, who is one of the best mentors to young bloggers that our class could hope to be looking at our work. These students were extremely pleased about the feedback and constructed excellent replies in the comments to further advance the conversation. Chris even sent us this brilliant picture when a student of his brought Milo into his life for the very first time.
So, if you are a regular reader of LA20’s blog or of my professional blog, Open Educator, please feel free to read the next installment of student posts and leave a probing or observational comment. This will help push our understanding as we strive to understand our inquiry question and take our learning beyond the walls of our classroom.
Here’s your challenge for your next blog post. Create a list of 10 things that are undisputably uniquely Australian and provide a justification for your choice. These choices must come from a variety of viewpoints - for example, you just can’t choose a list of 10 Aussie sports people, you can only choose one. Other possibilities for ideas can come from history, indigenous Australia, sport, Arts, geography, achievers , food, nature, language and clothing. It will pay to be as unique as possible as I am going to invite teachers (and hopefully students) from outside Australia to read your ideas and give you feedback. The last impression we would want to leave is that Australians are a bunch of copycats!
I’ll give you three as examples (but that means these cannot be used by anyone else in the class).
1. The Akubra hat.
These hats are great and uniquely Australian because they are quite different from cowboy hats as seen in America. They are made from rabbit fur which is useful because it helped reduce the number of rabbits in Australia, which have at times grown to plague proportions here down under. For more information, try the official website. http://flickr.com/photos/michaelsphotos/2352770948/
3. The dismissal of Gough Whitlam.
In 1975, Gough Whitlam was the Labor leader and the Prime Minister of Australia when he and his government were dismissed by the then Governor-General, Sir John Kerr in one of the most controversial moments in Australian politics.
For Term 4, the final PRP will be changing shape and actually be in the form of a Personal Research Story. You can choose whatever topic you are interested in but the final product must be in the form of a story - for example, the story of a Killer Whale, the story of New Zealand, the story of the Titanic and so on. A great resource we will be using will be Alan Levine’s “50 Ways To Tell A Story” - so you can do the research and shape the ideas into a story that can be told using digital or presentation tools. This will mean that not everyone will be locked into presenting in front of the class and will also give you the opportunity to post your work onto your blog for the wider community (and the world) to see.This gives the whole class the opportunity to use your initiative in a new compelling format that will tap into your creativity and contribute to the age old tradition of passing on knowledge via the story. More information will posted as it is negotiated.
This term, LA20 and LA21 have been working on an inquiry unit titled “Can We Make A Difference?” with a focus on the Port River Dolphins. So far, we have done some tuning in activities including a photo priority exercise and a mindmap. We also had a guest speaker, Ann from the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society who answered many of the questions generated by the mindmap activity.
As well as investigating facts and understandings around our local dolphins we have been reading and discussing other information sources about dolphins around the world to see if there are any common ideas and connections between humans and dolphins. As one class member, Amarildo pointed out this morning, it is very interesting that humans seem to be most interested and concerned about water based mammals in preference to other species that are also impacted by humans. So, this morning, we watched an online video from the EarthOcean.tv site titled Disappearing Dolphins.
It looked at the impact of overfishing in the Ionian Sea on the dolphin population while the banning of fishing in the Amvrakikos Gulf has produced the opposite effect. There were many important points raised by the class which will be covered in their blog posts. What I want to write about now is how I followed a link out of the EarthOcean.tv website and learnt quite a bit more about a unique dolphin known as the Baiji.
The Baiji dolphin is a unique species of river dolphin, but it is feared that it may already be extinct. It lived in the Yangtze River in China and had evolved to be slow moving and with limited eyesight because the waters are so muddy.
Map of the Yangtze in China from Wikipedia.
Even this dolphin’s dorsal fin has evolved into a different shape and in 2006, a scientific expedition was held to try and establish if there were still any significant groups of Baiji dolphins left. I watched a video interview with a Californian scientist who went on that trip and they found no evidence of the Baiji at all, leading to the conclusion that the Baiji may already be extinct. Another link led to another news item where a Chinese local had videoed what he believed to a Baiji dolphin in 2007, raising some hope that there may be some of these unusual dolphins left. When I saw the video, I wasn’t too convinced of anything. What do you think?
The scientist on the expedition made some really good points about this issue. The extinction of animals like dolphins living close to humans is a real possibility especially when saving the animal is stacked up against economic issues like jobs. There are many people who will say it is more important to be able to feed their family than to save a species of dolphin. Especially in an area like the Yangtze River where there is a reasonable sized boat every 100 metres, it would seem that human priorities will win every time. Could this eventually happen here in Adelaide with our Port River Dolphins?
Here are a few introductory videos on the fraction as we start our Maths work on this topic. Fractions have been around a long time (your Mum and Dad may even remember them from their school days!) as the first 1948 filmclip shows.
This is an interesting video that gives out some great examples of how fractions are used in real life - watch the first seven minutes as the final minutes refer to an online tutoring service. It is American and a little bit corny but maybe, you will see that fractions do have relevance to our daily experiences.
This classic video is a really interesting way to get our students thinking about measurement and its relationship to Maths and Science. It’s called the “Powers Of Ten” and is much easier to see here on our blog than on our interactive whiteboard where the subtlety of the stars and galaxies are hard to see clearly.
The class really enjoyed the activities on World Maths Day even though there were a few issues when we logged on with the wireless laptops. At first, we thought that it had to do with the complex website and that being closer to the wireless access point on the wall would help. As Stac08 and Amarildo were in a straight line with that point and were amongst the first logged on, that theory seemed to be true! But later on in an email, the truth about just how popular the Maths Day website was revealed:
We apologise for the difficulties which you experienced yesterday. The response to World Maths Day was overwhelming and consequently many users experienced difficulties logging onto the site and with the game. World Maths Day continues until it is no longer the 5th of March anywhere in the world so children are able to continue playing. We have also decided to extend the time the site is available until the end of the next school week so students are still able to play. Our IT team is working their hardest to improve the system so that it is better able to cope with demand next year. We hope that you will register to participate again next year.
So that was great. Quite a few more LA20 students enjoyed the extra time - Kostas11, Samster and Langer11 were amongst the keenest participants - and their keenness has really paid off when we got the following email.
We pleased to announce that [LA20] have won a free subscription to Mathletics until the end of the school year. Mathletics is a complete mathematics learning platform, including both the arithmetic game used in World Maths Day and interactive curriculum activities covering most topics and all year levels. Mathletics provides many benefits for teachers and schools. Of greatest value is the continual formative assessment, which is used diagnostically to guide both class and individual instruction.
How great is that? I know that some parents were keen on the Mathletics website but were unsure if the cost of subscription would be worthwhile. Now using your Maths day username and password, you can access the full Mathletics website for the rest of 2008, and you and your parents can work it out for yourselves.
Let me know in the comments here what you think. If your parents have any feedback, they can add that in here as well.
And yes, you, your family and friends can head over to the Awards site and cast a vote. Well done, Learning Area 20. What a great way to wind up the year. 
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