Just wanted to let people know that if you look down the right hand side of this blog, down below the flickr pictures, there is a new widget.

I installed it today. It’s a list of the five most recent blog posts that have been written by any student in the Idea Hive.

This will help you know who’s writing and what they are writing about. Click on any of the posts listed and it will take you right there so you can read and leave a comment behind!

Want to see what happens when 300 kids from 4 different countries get video cameras and are simply asked to film parts of their day?

26 minutes long, but worth the watch.

Thanks to Alan Levine for visiting the Idea Hive and teaching us a few things about digital storytelling. A great way to start a Friday!

I wanted to make sure that everyone has the link to the 5 Card Flickr site so that you can make some more stories. As well, lets get some of our own photos uploaded to flickr and tag them ideahive so that we can build some stories using our own photos.

Make sure you take a look around at each other’s blogs and check out the stories everyone made.

Both of our classrooms in Snow Lake and in Wingham are working hard to try to get our blogs up and running. This takes time, energy and some patience.

There is a lot to learn. Tech skills about making links, putting in pictures and inserting videos.

But blogging really isn’t about those things. Blogging is about making connections with others. Blogging is about sharing something of yourself, who you are, the things you are passionate about with the world.

Many of you have twitter accounts or facebook pages, or other spaces online where you talk with your friends, but a blog is different. A blog is your space where you are really free to wonder about the world, share yourself and be creative. You can write all sorts of things from questions to stories to news in your life and the world. You can share your favourite videos and tell us about the music you love. You can take pictures and post them up, you can write music and make your own videos.

This space is yours. Sure you need to learn a few things about how the technology actually works, and you definitely need to spend some time customizing your space and making it yours, but don’t forget that there are thousands of other students, just like you, out in the world. Kids from around the world are blogging in their classrooms and it isn’t that hard to make connections with them, we just need to find them…..

A grade 8 girl in Singapore wrote a post just the other day about what blogging is to her. You should take a look at it.

We live 2 700 km. apart in two different provinces across two different time zones. What could we possibly have in common with each other?

Everyone in the Idea Hive will be answering the questions in this survey. Once completed, we’ll be sharing the results with you, so you can find out if you’re really all that different.

Complete the survey below; add your first name and last name initial (e.g. Shelby A.).

The Idea Hive is a classroom like few others anywhere on earth. We are a classroom that is 2 700 kms across. We are about 60 students and two teachers. We work together on all sorts of things. We have space on this website to talk about things we like and things we don’t like. We see each other live almost every day. We take pictures, write blog posts, shoot videos and have our own radio station.

Welcome to the Idea Hive

WordPress blew up this summer.

Well, probably more accurately, I blew WordPress up this summer. A bad series of updates and database errors that simply couldn’t be recovered from led to the fact that the Idea Hive site needed to be completely rebuilt.

I  wasn’t sure whether I should be sad about having to do it, or angry about the content that we lost. Either way, it happened.

I’m working to get the site rebuilt. But it’s going to take some time. Things might be cranky around here for a while until all the bugs get worked out.

This was the intro from a TV show when I was a kid. It’s what this experience reminded me of.