Today, February 9th, is Safer Internet Day (SID) in Europe, although countries outside of the continent also choose to participate. This is an annual event sponsored by a network of Awareness Centers that helps promote young people’s safe and responsible use of the Internet and mobile devices. 

The theme this year is “Think B4 U Post” and they have included a promotional video to help highlight this point.

You probably found that video a bit humorous, but if you consider for a minute how a real person might feel once they realize they have mistakenly posted something embarrassing online that they can never truly get back you can imagine the consequences. Having someone else post pictures of you without permission can also have very serious negative consequences. In either case, you can begin to see how devastating that might be.

At the beginning of the year, we spent a considerable amount of time learning about how to protect our privacy and identity. Before you were given your own blog, you needed to prove that you understood how to be responsible online, both socially and for your safety. I’m happy to say that you have all been tremendously successful with this!

Your task today is to share your thoughts in a new blog post about how you manage your online identity.

• What do you do to be responsible online?
• What have you learned about Internet responsibility from our experiences with blogging and using Web 2.0 tools?
• How can you transfer what we have learned as a class into other online experiences you may have now or in the future(e.g. facebook, MSN, gaming)?

Think about how blogging has built on what you already knew about your online responsibilities or how it has opened your eyes to what the risks are and how you can minimize them. How savvy have you become?

You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.
                                     ~ Juan Gris ~

Wednesday afternoons are filled with creativity, discovery and individuality. It’s our Art time! We have spent some time investigating portraits from both cubist and realistic view points. We started with cubism and looked at how facial features could be represented with abstract shapes. Picasso and Matisse provided many examples and discussion starters for our class. Using chalk pastels and our trusted Sharpies, students created abstract portraits that represented themselves in some way – physically or emotionally. Amazingly colourful and expressive images began to emerge. No two were alike, but they were all stunning.

Next we moved on to realistic portraits and learned the fascinating facts about drawing faces. Did you know that our eyes are really about half way down our faces? Did you know that your ears begin at the mid-level of your eyes and end at the level of the bottom of your nose? On paper bags, students drew their likeness following the “rules” on “how to create a portrait“. Using this formula, we were able to create a class full of cartoon-like replicas with our trusty Sharpies again and oil pastels this time.

Check out our many masterpieces!

English can be a funny language. It has a lot of rules to learn, but once you learn them you find out there are exceptions. Some words follow strange patterns and we’ve been exploring a few of these while we’re learning the rules of making plurals. Irregular plurals live in a world all their own!

Imagine if the rules of irregular plurals were extended to other English words that were part of the same word family. If words that ended in “-oose” always changed to “-eese” when they became more than one (like “goose” to “geese”), then the plural of “moose” would have to be “meese”!

If irregular rules became regular, what would English look and sound like? Read on to see if you can make sense of the paragraph below.

This winter, it has been considerably warmer than usual which has led to a lot of rain, but this hasn’t stopped many of us from enjoying time outside. You need a great pair of beet though first! Where I live there are a number of creeks behind people’s hice which create some of the swampiest areas ever. In some schools, all the water rice student interest so much that rules have to be  created about jumping in puddles! Imagine! Puddle ben in the schoolyards! It’s not surprising that there are a few students who risk the consequences and can’t resist a jump or two. The problem is they are often caught in their lice when their drenched clothes give them away. I can understand the temptation, but students will have to be slier than foxen to outsmart the teachers and principals. In a few months the water will subside and we’ll no longer need our beet very much, but until then students will have to work on some well-thought out plen to maximize their opportunities for puddle jumping in other ways and at other times.

Did you find it difficult to read through? Were you able to determine the irregular rules that were used? Feel free to add a comment to explain which words were made plural and what they should really have been.

Check out some of the student blogs this week for silly plural poems that highlight some of these irregular rules.

image: Language Rules Week part 4 by hartboy through Creative Commons license

Our two weeks of looking after the student friends international blog, Bringing Us Together, is over and now, we’re looking forward to seeing what appears from the next groups in charge. Taking the reigns for this short time was an interesting feeling knowing that we were a part of something much bigger than our class blog. 

It was great to see a few Ripplers volunteered to write guest posts to help get things started as well and they are definitely worth checking out. They offered great advice, insight, and information about topics that are important to many of us here on this side of the world. 

• What does blogging mean to you?
• Strays on the Street
• 2010 Winter Olympic Games
• A Tough Life

Enjoy the read! I know I did.

image: Individually Boxed Earth Cupcakes by clevercupcakes through Creative Commons license

Exciting news, Division 2! The Ripple Effect has recently received its 1000th flag in our flag counter! Granted, many of those Canadian flags are us, but we know that many other individuals from Canada have visited here as well. Our class blog has been seen in 22 countries so far and the list just keeps on growing.

Not bad for 4 months of blogging! Hopefully, those numbers will keep increasing as our visitors come back to see what we’ve been up to and new ones find us. Have you checked lately to see which countries are visiting the most? If you click on the Flag Counter widget, it’ll show you the percentage of visitors from each country. It will tell you what country our most recent visitor came from and which flag is the newest. On that same page, if you click on the country name from the list, you’ll have instant access to quite a bit of information about that particular place. It’s quite an informative site. 

Just imagine what our numbers could be by the end of the year. Any guesses?

image: 2008 Burlington Independence Day Fireworks by found_drama through Creative Commons

When the 2nd Blogging Challenge ended last Spring, many of the participants wanted to stay connected. The next challenge wasn’t scheduled to start until this past September, so a new international blog was established and appropriately named Bringing Us Together. Here, teachers and students took on the responsibility of posting and moderating for approximately two weeks at a time. Through this site, classes from several different countries have been able to continue to build on their blogging skills and learn with each other.

When the third Challenge (the one we just finished participating in) ended in November, the Bringing Us Together blog became active once again! This time our class will be one of the participants and since some schools around the world are on their summer break right now, I have volunteered Division 2 to take on the task of being the first moderators. We are now in charge of an international blog!

Seeing as this is our first year participating in it, I thought it would be great to start off with a challenge that would help us learn a bit more about where other participants are from. When I found out that the first day of our new job was also National Trivia Day in the United States, I had an idea. What if we suggested an “International Trivia Week” where students and teachers could write simple facts about their country and then link their posts back to the student friends blog?

So this week, one of your challenges is to write a post that includes 5 trivia questions about Canada. You also need to include information about the new blog we are part of and our responsibility with it. Visit our class’ first post on the international blog for more information about National Trivia day and this challenge

Finding trivia questions can take a bit of time. It’s important to find facts that aren’t too tough and that will help others learn a bit more about Canada. I’m looking forward to seeing all of your questions. Remember you’ll need to eventually give answers, but don’t do this right away.

image: Blue Marble (Planet Earth) by woodleywonderworks through Creative Commons

There’s a new year ahead of us and lots to look forward to. We’re only a few days into January, but so far 2010 is off to a great start. Many people at this point begin to look back on the year that just ended and begin to assess what they would like to do differently or what they can improve on in the months ahead.  These self-improvement goals are better known as New Year’s resolutions and are a long-standing tradition in many different parts of the world.

Have you ever wondered where the idea of New Year’s resolutions originated?

It’s believed that an ancient civilization called the Babylonians were the first to celebrate New Years Day. That was over four thousand years ago! The Babylonians were a civilization in Mesopotamia that existed where Iraq is today. Although they held celebrations for their New Year, these didn’t occur until March because the beginning of the spring planting of crops marked the beginning of their year.

The ancient Babylonians believed that what a person does on the first day of the New Year will have an effect throughout the entire year. Sound a bit familiar? Although it has evolved into the New Year’s we have today, we can look back to Babylonia to see its origins.

 So what happens after people make their resolutions?

Well, only 20% of the people who make New Year’s resolutions keep them. That means out of every 100 people who set goals for the New Year, only about 2o were able to successfully complete them. Many don’t last past the first week and the rest of the 80% don’t make it past February. Here are a few reasons why people are not successful with their resolutions.

• A lack of planning
• The goal is too much out of their control
• Goals are too large or unrealistic
• Goals are too specific
• They don’t write them down
• The goals aren’t reassessed/evaluated over the weeks and months
• The goals don’t allow for small successes along the way
• People set too many goals
• Totally new tasks are chosen rather than building on something they’re already doing

The Oxfam Education site offers suggestions on how to make resolutions that can affect more than just ourselves. Think of the 4 categories you need to set a goal in: personal, school, local community, and global. Use webspiration to organize your ideas around each goal. You’ll need several details about the small changes you will make on your way to success! What can you do to help yourself achieve this goal? How can you make sure yours sticks?

Once you have your web completed, convert it to an outline and begin writing your Resolutions post on your blog. You will need to include an introduction that demonstrates what you know about New Year’s resolutions and a conclusion after you share what each of your goals are and how you are going to maximize your chances for success. Once you’re done, leave a comment on this post about your thoughts on New Years. In June, we will all reflect on our goals to see if we are part of the 20% or not (hopefully, yes!) and what progress we have made.

I’m looking forward to reading all of your resolutions and learning about how you are planning to make a difference in your local, national, and global community.

Be the change you want to see in the world ~ Mahatma Ghandi

image: Happy New Year by ΛltoExyl through Creative Commons

2010 is here and this is the first Monday after New Years day, so it marks our return to school!  There are a lot of new adventures on the horizon for us in school, as well as in our country. For starters, Canada is facing off against the United States in the gold medal game of the World Junior Hockey Championships tomorrow. Go Canada! Then, a month from now the 2010 Olympics begin in Vancouver! It looks like it’s going to be a great year with all that excitement to start it off.

image: 2010 Team Canada logo by tyfn

Here’s wishing everyone a safe, relaxing, and fun Winter Break. Have a great 2 weeks off and we’ll see you in Januray 2010! I’m looking forward to hearing about it all when we get back.

images

• Snowman Neighbor by MGShelton through Creative Commons
• christmas decoration – birch stars & ornaments by himmelskratzer
• Snowflake by mammamia through Creative Commons

On our last day before Winter Break, we decided to spend most of the afternoon exchanging gifts. But not any gifts … tacky gifts! So how do we define tacky?

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary ”tacky” means not having or exhibiting good taste or marked by a lack of style. 

So with that thought in mind, everyone set out to find an item at home that fit this description. It really could be anything, but the deal was it needed to be in suitable regifting condition. That meant it needed to be in respectable shape and appropriate for school.

Everyone in the class drew a random number out of a container to determine the order of the gift selection. When gifts were opened, everyone waited for a resounding “Wow! This is the best gift ever! I’ve always wanted a _____.” and then waited to see if it was followed by “but ….” because gift openers could trade their gift for another that was already opened. No right to refusal. No complaints. Gifts could only be exchanged 3 times, though, as time was precious. We ended up discovering that we would have benefitted from starting the exchange even earlier. After the last gift was opened and exchanged a few times, we feasted on the fabulous treats brought for the afternoon.

The process proved to be extremely funny and full of community spirit. It’s truly amazing what you can find laying around the house!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

image: holidays christmas sweater by Sterin through Creative Commons license