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I just wanted to share this with you.
The other day someone suggested I take a look at this video and I have to say it touched me. Having been to Africa myself I can appreciate the meaning of the video. Going to Africa changed the way I view my life here back in Canada. No matter what comes into my life I will not let my circumstances dictate how I should feel.
Burma Aid Wide
Hello Everybody!!
Well I have about 3 weeks left before I venture off to another far away place. I will be packing my bags and making the journey over to Thailand and Burma for a few weeks.
I was asked to join a friend of mine, Mike Kerychuk from Reaching Kids Internationally, to come and work for a few days with youth who are attending a bible college. As well we will be visiting families that have moved into an abandoned dog shelter (the conditions of the shelter where so bad that the government has closed down) and working with Mike to see if there anything we can do for these families.
I will be working on a few different projects while I am away on this trip.
The first will be the actual project with working with the students in Burma and Thailand.
The second is with a local group of grade 5 students and seeing if I can comminicate with them while I am overseas as well as I’ll be working with them on using technology.
(For more on this project please see this site http://thailandburma.shift8.ca/)
Lastly I will be looking at how a sub $500 netbook can be used in the field for missionary work for missionaries with very limited budgets.
Also while I am away I will be trying to keep Bryna Jones – Public Relations Coordinator for Streams of Hope updated on what I will be doing while I am away.
You will be able to follow her posts here at http://streamsofhope.wordpress.com/.
Original Story Posted: http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/26/sugar-labs-sugar-on-a-stick-os-available-for-any-and-all/
I have been following this program for a few years now when it was first developed for the One Laptop Per Child and now I am more excited now that it is exiting its beta release and now is ready for real classroom use.
What is Sugar?
The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software.
(Quote from www.sugarlabs.org)
This product focuses more on team collaboration instead of “office” centric. Great ideas and I hope to see more from them in the future
There are many variations of this video now available on the web, but I like how this one has been put together.
This video has been shown around at our school system to stimulate conversation about how we has a school district have the responsibility to help prepare students for the future and how we have to find better ways of preparing.
The video will quickly show that even within our own lifetime change is happening at an extremely rapid pace, and things that our parents had to deal with are different then the things we have too. For me this bring to light the question How are our children and grandchildren going to cope and deal with the upcoming changes? and How are we as their guides/teachers and leaders going to help them?
I work for a school board, not as a teacher but as an administrator in our computer department, and over the last couple years there has been an increasing push in the literacy and numeracy areas of academics. I have noticed a dwindling in arts, music, and physical education in our elementary schools, but on the other hand there has been a rise on the more creative side of education in our secondary schools. They have been offering guitar class as an option to “band”, the drama classes have become increasingly more popular as well. The biggest change that I have noticed is in the computer education.
When I was in high school, computer class meant one of 2 things, either computer programming or office administration. I am seeing less of the programming courses and more of the creative side of things, like digital art, photography, and video editing.
I believe that as our students on a whole are bored with school and by offering them more “creative/expressive” type of courses it allows them to explore who they really are. Recently I was asked to speak at a career day at one of our secondary schools and I recommended to the students that now is the time for them to enroll in courses that they normally wouldn’t enroll in. Try and art class, take a drama class, volunteer at things you may have never thought of. All of these things help with expanding your sense of you.
Anyway, enough of my rant 
. Ken is a great speaker and this was a good video for anyone that works in the education field to watch.
