Week One: Connected World

We've made our way through the first one week++ of the Connected World project with the 7th grade humanities students. Last week we got together in topic groups and had the kids try to figure out what their topic is all about. I must say I was very, very pleased with the discussions in heard. I had the "health" group and the "human rights" group in my room. The students truly engaged in meaningful conversation, and I was surprised at the depth of understanding some of them already possessed about the topic. Many demonstrated an awareness of current events from around the world. The health discussions ranged from SARS to AIDS to Malaria and Yellow Fever. I gently guided this group to think about health issues in western and/or fully developed countries; this mild prompt led to a discussion of health care systems in the US, Canada, and Norway. In both class, the human rights groups inevitably wound up talking about government, arguing back and forth the ultimate purpose of government and where it came from in the first place. On another note, part of the Connected World Project student requirments is regular blogging. I decided to use my school's (International School Bangkok) new social networking site. The kids all automatically have an account created for them and they simply log in using the same user name and password combo as they do to log into any computer on campus. Anyhow, the school's social networking site is brand new. It is sort of like "Facebook lite." It does, however, include a blogging feature, so that's what sold me on using it (testing it out, really) for this project. The thing I like about it is once I become "friends" with my students, I can organize them into groups (classes) and easily sort through their blogs that way. On that note, my students are getting pretty good about identifying what it is that they're writing. We first really hit on that necessity when using google docs. There isn't any way to tell who is sharing a document with you if it's from "lunchladyposse@yahoo.com" and titled "My Essay". The social networking site takes care of that partialy because everything they post, no matter where on the site or in what format (blog, picture, message, comment, etc.) the student name automatically is attatched. Students can't change their user name or display name. Anyhow, as my wonderful colleague Robin pointed out on her blog, we've been having issues with the connection at school. It is very, very frustrating for many reasons. First of all, it's usually be quite good and not too slow, of course with the occasional bit of slowdown/hault. However, last week was quite bad with daily periods of lost connections and pages simply not loading. This is doubly frustrating when trying to present some ideas on the SmartBoard to a class. I know you can preload the pages and work around some of it to prepare for the presenation, but when trying to show kids how iGoogle works and the differences between the RSS on that service and google. reader, it's nice to have a live connection! It's double frustrating because if the intenet is down, they can't simply write something because most/all of what they should write for the project is at this point on a blog. A few times last week we had to resort to old fashioned Word documents!! Obviously there will be periods when the internet isn't working, but it does raise some concerns, especially if a school is moving to a netbook program.