Here is the winner from Chehalem Valley Middle School…

Chase and Marissa

See the rest of the stories from CVMS here.

Here is the winning story:

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Here is the winner from the International School in Tianjin, China. Congratulations go to Jenna & Carin!

See all their stories here.

Here is the winning story:

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The winner from CrossRoads Middle School was Ariel.

See all the stories here.

Here is the winning story:

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It’s been a LONG time in coming, and due to some really odd circumstances the judging process took much longer than expected.

That said, I am going to begin announcing one winner per day, with his or her story embedded below. I would love it if a group of folks would watch and comment on the story.

Of course, you can see all the projects from all the schools by visiting the Life Round Here wiki and looking for the link to completed projects (or follow those links!).

Keep a watch out here for the winners!

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I don’t know about you, but when I’m uploading video to one of those other video hosting services (to remain nameless) it’s frustrating to see just an “encoding” label slapped on a video. I end up hitting refresh to see if it’s done!

Today I am experimenting with Vimeo, after seeing Shareski use it. He’s my inspiration for a lot lately.

I came across this screen, which moves when it’s not a screenshot, and was so pleasantly refreshed.

Now if only it will accept this darn .wmv file that Fliqz has rejected time after time.

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The project deadline was theoretically October 31. We’re being intentionally loose about folks publishing the stories since this project is much more about student learning than high stakes deadlines.

That said, so far 13 schools have posted six stories. Wow! That’s (doing the math) 78 stories!

Here is a snapshot of the completed projects thus far…

With more on the way, I think!

Another fun something, DK from Mediasnackers contacted me about featuring a story or two from CrossRoads in his latest vodcast. You can find Episode 11 of the ever-wonderful Mediasnackers Vodcast page. Thanks to DK for featuring one of our stories!

Go watch some of the stories, so that you can see the amazing work our kids are doing! Also feel free to spread the word, folks are always looking for examples of real-life student projects, and here are some!

http://chriscraft.pbwiki.com is the main page, and then you can click on completed projects to see the schools that have published.  Good stuff!

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Curious as to how the Life Round Here project is turning out?

Well, the wait is over, some of the schools are posting stories and they are ready for you to watch!

Click the image for the entire list, and check back often (or better yet, subscribe to the page feed!)

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PbWiki announced a new feature that I think is fantastic, and the implementation is just great. Any page you tag with template will show up when you click create a new page.

For me, that’s darn nice. For Life Round Here participants, that’s really nice.

All you have to do now is log in with your contributor login (remember to use the my.pbwiki.com page to make it easier) and then click on Create a New Page. Once you do that, you’ll see this screen…

Use the indicated one and you’ll be automatically set up with the exact format we want! Good stuff, just good stuff.

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My classes and I spent four days last week in the computer lab working on our projects. After watching nearly one hundred stories I’ve narrowed our field down to a few to be posted to the project wiki for comptetion. I think we’ve got some good ones!

If you’re participating or just interested, Kim Cofino (who is amazing, by the way!) has penned a solid lesson plan for how to break this thing down into digestable chunks.

For what it’s worth, my kids had loads of trouble defining what American culture even is, let alone determining how it has changed in recent times. Are we in the midst of a lack of cultural identity?

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In case you’ve been following the little project we’re developing, Life ‘Round Here is up to 16 schools that have agreed to participate!

Here is a snapshot from the wiki, which lists all the participants.

My original goal was 10 schools, so we’re up six!

I am terrified, to be frank. I’ve never dealt with something like this, so it will be a real good thing if we make it through unscathed.

One note, sign-up ends on September 21, 2007 for Round 1. There will be a Round 2 beginning in February or March, when some of our outside-the-US friends get back from “summer” break.

I’ve got another blog post coming soon about whether the variety of locations really makes this type of a project more beneficial to student learning. At prima facie I’m tempted to already call this a success based on the geographic variety, but that can be fleeting. I’ll get into more detail on that later.

Rest assured, however, the project is in my opinion pedagogically sound and will be well served by such non-US centric participation.

Know someone who would be a good fit for the project? Read the original post and tell them to sign up!

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