Neveh Channah HS Computer Club (in Hebrew)

After returning to school from a two month teacher's strike, I decided that one of the ways to bring about adoption of web2.0 skills in the school would be to have a weekly computer club. Most clubs at our school take place on Monday evenings between 20:00-21:30 (the girls dorm on Monday nights). Not easy to find a committed group of kids to come every week, especially when running against choir, drama, dance, etc.
I decided to try anyway. Decided to run a fast moving track to have kids learn and adopt web2.0 tools to give them skills which would allow them to express themselves using online collaborative digital tools.
I started out building a wikispaces wiki which contained a sampling of exciting web2.0 applications. At the first meeting we learned about web2.0 and saw a demonstration of cool tools - Flickr,animoto, voicethread, wikispaces, del.icio.us bookmarks, RSS feeds etc.
This brought four girls to join up.
On week 2 we did digital photography, uploading to computer, online editing with Picnik and uploading the before and after pics to each girls wiki page.
On week 3 we set out to find online pics for making animoto clips. We had a discussion about copyright and fair use and decided to use Creative Commons pics from Flickr. Each student did a search for pics around a theme and then saved them, uploaded them to an Animoto account which she opened, ordered them, chose a musical background from Animoto's music collection and submitted the clip for automatic editing. After viewing the clip, the girls learned how to embed their clips on their personal wiki pages. They then each wrote a few sentences explainng the meaning of their clips. I asked them to comment on each others clips on the discussion area of their wiki pages.
You can see the results here:
Merav
Dana
Elisheva
Orly



So far we have been having a great time, learning much, practicing between meetings, teaching family about the newly acquired skills.
I hope that we will keep up the enthusiasm and deepen the learning experience.
You are invited to leave remarks for the girls on the discussion areas of their pages (in English or Hebrew) after signing in to wikispaces. They will enjoy sharing their work with you.