Other items implemented this week...

This week the children have started to understand the concept of publishing and uploading their work.  We have found Dropbox to be fantastically useful.  It automatically uploads all new photos from the iPads and from my iPhone into Dropbox, which can all be retrieved on any device, published directly or transferred through another programme, such as iMovie or Photobucket, and then onto the wiki pages.

We have been having fun with making Avatars - this week the children focused on making a WeeMe on WeeWorld.  They then had to do a screenshot (the first time that they had done this), drop it onto the desktop and then upload a file onto their wiki page. Most of them coped really well with this, but some found the many steps required a little challenging.

We have joined a couple of global collaborations!  Using Edmodo we will be connecting with other Year 3 classes in America, India and other countries.  None of the other schools have started yet as it is their Summer holidays, but they will all be in contact over the next few weeks as they begin their school year.  We have also been involved in a collaborative writing project run by an author, Brian Walker.  He publishes the beginning of the story and we get to suggest an ending.  Go to http://thereadingroom.schoolblogs.org/ if you want to have a look or to have a go yourself.  Lots of fun and as we wrote it as a shared writing exercise, we talked a lot about re-reading, re-crafting and many, many different strategies used to make our writing acceptable for submission to an audience.  I notice that Mr Walker also has a vocabulary section on his blog, so we may be revisiting this for our Extending Vocabulary group!

The other exciting site we joined was a site called Biblionasium, which is a book review site.  The children have loved adding the books that they have read, writing brief reviews about them and sharing their recommendations with their friends.  It is a very visual site, very user-friendly and a great way to get students sharing their passion for reading.