Hello from New Zealand

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Permalink Reply by Anne Mirtschin on August 1, 2007 at 7:06am

Hello Chrissy, I teach IT in Victoria, Australia. We are a small prep to 12 school and I also teach year 6 and 7 IT. We would be really interested in connecting with you. We are currently focussing on making podcasts.

Permalink Reply by TeachingSagittarian on August 3, 2007 at 4:08am

Hi Anne
We would love to connect with you too! I don't know too much about podcasting but it's an area that we are really interested in having a go at! My email is teaching.sagittarian@gmail.com Let's organise something!

Permalink Reply by linda on August 5, 2007 at 6:38pm

I'm new to all of this, but what caught my eye was your comment about making connections and having conversations ... Have you done this in the past? If so, what was your topic and how did you go about implementing into the curriculum? I really would like to do just what you are talking about this coming school year.

Permalink Reply by TeachingSagittarian on August 7, 2007 at 5:28am

Hi Linda and welcome to "this"! My class and I love making connections with other classes around the world - we started off by reading other class blogs and making comments, I also made comments and read a lot of teacher blogs, especially Vicki Davis (CoolCatTeacher), Chris Craft (Crucial Thought) and probably the best thing I did was sign up our class to Jennifer Wagner's Online Projects - www.technospudprojects.com. From there we met some fabulous teachers and their classes interested in doing similar IT projects to us. We completed our first online collaborative project called www.projectfeelgood.wikispaces.com - it was awesome! We were also lucky enough to join in with the Horizon Project www.horizonproject.wikispaces.com and be a sounding board peer review team for this amazing project spearheaded by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay. Another really cool place to put up a request for making connections with other schools around the world is www.cilc.org
You can post a message on the bulletin board for free stating what you'd like to do, what age level you'd like to connect with etc. It only took a couple of days and we had quite a few replies. From there, we managed to make a connection and have a video conference with a school in Huntsville Alabama. That was really exciting because we came into school early and they stayed later in the afternoon so we could compare our worlds! The teachers/educators I have "met" online so far have been so generous and so willing to help out - it's just amazing!