Project #7 C4K October

In the month of October, I was privileged to read the blogs of several students and comment on them. Children never cease to amaze me! It is wonderful to see a child learning and participating, benefiting from peer reviews and comments from around the world. I have to say, I am always impressed by the students’ blogs. They put in pictures, links, RSS feeds, maps and other visitor-tracking counters like we do here in Dr. Strange's class. I have to give kudos to their teachers for giving these students a jump start in technology at such a young age.

The first student I will tell you about is a second grade student in Ms. Morris’ class at Leopold Primary School named Jarrod. He had a neat blog post about water conservation and listed several ways to save water around your home. He asked how long we think it takes for the water cycle to complete. He thought it was one day. I told him I liked his answer, but I had found a different answer when I looked online, and shared a link with him about the water cycle. I also asked Jarrod if he would like to Skype with someone from our class. He replied to me and said his Mum was looking into it. I was happy to see him eager to do this.

The next young man I corresponded with was Joshua in Ms. Laburn’s class. The students in this class were very young, so there was no writing to comment on, but I told him i really liked the different reading and math games and other links he put on his site. I even let my daughter play one of the reading games and she enjoyed it.

Next I had Serenity from Mrs. Gregory’s class. This young lady had a blog post stating that she was in the hospital and was missing her teacher, her friends and science! Luckily, I saw on her class blog where the teacher had been listing assignments and posts about what the class had been learning. In this way, Serenity could keep up with what’s going on in class even though she can’t be present.

Then I viewed the blog of Noah. He was a young man of very few words who just started his blog. I told him his page was interesting and I really liked the magic 8-ball.

My last student was Lorenzo, a third grader at Pt. England School in Australia. He made an animated video of the Dublin Castle in Ireland. I think it is outstanding that an 8-year-old was able to do this. It’s amazing what children can do with the right teacher and right tools. Below is the still drawing of Lorenzo's castle.

These children are doing the same kind of work we are doing in our EDM310 class. You have to wonder, are these children advanced in technology, or (for those of us new to blogging) are we college students behind?