We’ve had our iPods up and running for a few months now and it’s about time we shared some of our experiences with them. A little while back, I wrote about our initial plans for using them around literacy, which focused on comprehension strategies that are often reserved for teaching students to be better readers. We didn’t want to limit ourselves to reading though, so we expanded them to help us better understand the world through what we see, hear, and experience. Hopefully, our video helps explain the rest. We always love to hear feedback or if you have any questions, we’d love to try to answer them!

February 8th, 2011 is Safer Internet Day. What is that, you ask?  Just like the title suggests, it’s a day set aside to promote Internet awareness with young people. Originally, this event began in Europe, but it has now spread to over 65 countries. It happens at the perfect time for us because it’s about the half-way mark of the year and it’s a great opportunity to review how savvy we have become.

In our class, we prefer to use the term “Internet Savvy” rather than “Internet Safe”. Can you see a difference between the two? To us, Internet savviness means being aware of the big picture and understanding the risks and benefits of any decisions we make online. It’s about protecting our personal information so we can avoid potentially harmful situations. Becoming savvy also means developing the ability to anticipate the cause and effect of our actions, in essence becoming self-aware.

A lot of times, Internet safety is taught through the medium of fear. Fear of who it is you are talking to online, fear of who you are sending images or movies to, or fear that there are individuals online who are a danger to children. We need to be careful about focusing on the fear factor when it comes to supporting the development of online behaviour. Are there risks? Absolutely! But …

When we look through a lens of fear, we can become overly focused on one aspect and unintentionally lose sight of others. In a nut shell, if we become so worried about a potential scenario it may blind us to others situations that could put us at risk as well. The easiest solution to some may be to avoid it entirely, but it’s difficult to learn how to become savvy when you don’t have access to it.

However, if we look through a lens of savviness or awareness, we can assess a much bigger scope of potential hazards because our focus is on understanding both the impact and risk associated with our online actions. The Internet is a glorious resource for our 21st century learning. Our job as surfers is to tap into it with a wary eye while making sound decisions that maintain our privacy and protect our personal information.

Ripplers, this week your task is to reflect on how your savviness is developing. What have you become more aware of this year? Have you been surprised by anything new you’ve learned about this topic?

We’d also love to hear how other classes and students are improving their savviness? Feel free to share your ideas so we can all benefit from each other.

That’s right everyone.  ANGLES ATTACKED ANIMOTO, and our class thought that if we were going to see angles everywhere that we would help others to identify and measure angles by sharing their learning processes. Please check out each students’ angle posts as they should all be up in the New Year.

Wow! What an adventure I, Ms. Rogerson, was able to have with Mrs. Braidwood’s Ripplers!  I must admit that my last two weeks with them really opened my mind up not only to angles in our everyday lives, but also to a really important tip: When new learning comes our way and it challenges us…have patience, connect it with something you know, work through it, have more patience and don’t give up!  Thank you Ripplers and the rest of the blogging community for joining us on this angle adventure.

How would you use Animoto to share your learning?  Do you have a post that includes an Animoto video?

WARNING: If you don’t see angles everywhere yet…this post will really open your minds to a world of angles you have never seen before! Ms. Rogerson here to give you one last update on our angle adventures.  As you may have heard the Ripplers have been working very hard to identify and measure angles not only in and around our school environment, but also in other areas of interest like sports.  The following videos also show us that angles really do have ATTITUDE!  The first two videos are hosted in YouTube, so I apologize if you are unable to view them from school.

What angles do you see in gymnastics events?

What rotations do you see in snowboarding tricks?

What angles and rotations do you see as Danny MacAskill makes his way back home on his BMX?

Where do you see angles and rotations in your life and surrounding environments?

It can be difficult to imagine how vast the Internet really is. We’re often caught up in our local circles of social networking and email, so we’re not always thinking how much bigger the Internet is than us. Now a great many of us know it’s a world wide phenomen (largely because we know www = world wide web), but once you’re reminded of all that goes on in a second, a minute, an hour, or even more it makes you take a second look at what you are a part of. It’s not the cozy little online network you thought it was and the need to be Interent savvy becomes that much more apparent once it’s all put into perspective.

What surprised you the most with this social media counter? Did you click on “1 day” or “1 month” to see how the numbers change? When you watch the counter numbers add up quickly, does it make you think of your time on the Internet and what you spend time doing there? Has it prompted you to make any changes about how you act online?

After becoming quite proficient with the process we used in our language arts videos, a few Ripplers paired up with the students in our little buddy kindergarten class to help the showcase their knowledge of the butterfly life cycle. There are only 12 students in this class, which meant only some of our class participated, but there were always others willing to help out when someone was away on the day we met up with our little buddies.

Over the course of a approximately 5 weeks, the kindergarten students showed their big buddies what they had learned about the life cycle of a butterfly. Armed with different library resources, the big buddies tried to fill in any gaps as needed. So many of us learned that a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis whereas a moth goes through its metamorphosis in a cocoon. Our kindergarten buddies knew their stuff! Then, together they made a storyboard to map out the main events. From there, they identified the key vocabulary words in the process and wrote a narrative story together in each little buddy’s words (with a little help) to share what they knew.

In their own class, the kindergarten students drew pictures of the 4 stages in the life cycle: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly.  Then during the final week of school, each big buddy met with his/her little buddy to record their story using Audacity. It was in an interesting process because it was recorded in pieces to maximize expression and the clarity of the words. Big buddies had to learn to model the result they were looking for. Once edited, it was converted to an mp3 and the big buddies took all of their props – little buddy drawings, vocabulary words, title page, and any supplementary props mentioned in the story – and partnered with another big buddy to create the video portion.

Watching the big and little buddies work together to teach each other – they taught us about butterflies and we taught them about technology – was a fascinating process. Here are a few examples of what the end result was.  We think they are fabulous and really enjoyed helping our little buddies create their own videos. You can see more of them on our class youtube channel, OurRippleEffect. Most of them are up, but a few are still in the editing process and will be up shortly. There will be 12 in total.

Rainbow and Bowie’s Adventure from Jaki Braidwood on Vimeo.

The Butterfly Effect from Jaki Braidwood on Vimeo.

image: Birth of a Butterfly by Kiwi Flickr released under a CC Attrubution license

Our second class video is now up on youtube and already receiving a great number of hits! This one is about personification. Tara, Stephanie, Greg, and Yana worked really hard to get their video done on Thursday before I left with the Grade 7′s on their year-end camping trip. So now we have 2 down and 3 more to go. Hopefully, by Monday afterschool we’ll have the third one here too. Here is the Vimeo version in case you can’t access youtube in school. If teachers would like to know how we created this, please click here for the complete instructions.

Personification Smartypants! from Jaki Braidwood on Vimeo.

One of the reasons we started this project was that we were unable to find videos that explained figurative language and poetic devices well. We found quite a few that combined them all in one video and gave a brief snapshot of them, but to really learn about them for the first time at an elementary school level, we seemed to be out of luck. Our solution to this was to create our own and post them for others to use as well just in case they also found themslves in a similar situation. We hope others will find these explanations valuable. We’d love to hear comments about them.

Ripplers … remember this video, the Networked Student? We originally watched it to get a feel of the commoncraft design we used for our own videos. We watched it a few times, so I could ask you to focus on different things. The first time, I asked you to watch for the tools you recognize being used by the student attending 21st century High School. If I had shown this to you in September, you wouldn’t necessarily have recognized what all of these were.

Networked Student from Brian Grenier on Vimeo.

1. In a post, create a list using bullets to describe your 21st century skills.
2. Then, write about which skills you think will be the most useful to you in the future as you head off to high school either at the end of this year or next.  

Explain how these skills might help you or what you think you might use them to do. Take your time to think about this one before you begin.

You own all that you have learned this year. Show me how you will make the most of it.

Over the last month and a bit, students have been working in groups to produce their own instructional videos about figurative language and poetic devices. There are 5 in total that cover the topics of similes, metaphors, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and personification. Below is the first of these. 

Super Awesome Spectacular Similes from Jaki Braidwood on Vimeo.

These videos have helped us each learn about these topics to a better degree, but we’re also very happy to know that they could end up helping other people with their understanding as well. Plus, it is pretty neat to see your work up on youtube for the world to see (the Vimeo version has been posted here because many schools cannot access y0utube).

When the other 4 have been finalized, they will be posted as well. We hope you enjoy watching them as much as we enjoyed making them.

For teachers who are curious about the process we undertook to make these, you can find our instructions available here.

Let us know what you think. We’re always open to feedback.

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?