We’re sad ……
The very apologetic man from Orcon came and took away our satellite dish.
We can no longer video conference with anyone BUT we can still 
Gone on Holiday
Lucky Kawekakea has gone on holiday for the next two weeks. He’s gone down to the South Island with 18princess and her family to meet some of his namesakes – the keas. He was very excited on Thursday afternoon to be going home in 18princess’s schoolbag. Check back soon for tales of his school holiday adventures!
Video Conferencing with Alabama
We just experienced the most awesome opportunity to Video Conference with Huntsville, Alabama at 7.00am (our time) 2.30pm the day before (Alabama’s time) on Wednesday. (Thanks to the very generous people at SONY NZ – who have lent us this video conferencing equipment for a few weeks).
Even though Alabama had just had a thunderstorm pass over, the quality of the video conference was still excellent. With our questions prepared we began to interact with each other. The types of questions we asked were things like sports played, music and artists listened too, how big is your school, what do you do in your spare time after school, class sizes, subjects available, grades/years at your school, school environment and many, many more.
The things we noticed the most were the word differences and accent as well as our uniform versus Alabama’s mufti! (which is NZ speak for wearing your own clothes). Y’all was a fascinating word for us to hear.
This was such an exciting event and so easy to do. Ms H learnt quite a bit about how she would manage a video conference or even a skype call next time. She’ll post about that a bit later in the new page called Skype/Video Conferencing Tips of this blog.
We’ve decided to create a wikispace together so that we can keep in contact with our new friends in Alabama. Keep checking back here to see the links when the wikispace has been created.
More on Anti-Cyberbullying
We had a discussion about cyberbullying and how to stop it. We came up with ideas of how we could help stop it:
- Stand up and say stop it – don’t keep quiet about it
- Report it - tell someone – a parent, a teacher, an adult you trust
- Keep talking about it and spread the message
- Just don’t do it
We came up with half a dozen ways to that people use to bully people over the internet like: videos, pictures/images, voice recorder/audio or written word.
After our two week holiday, we’re going to make a powerpoint presentation on Stop Cyberbullying.
Kawekakea Saves The Day
One day in the middle of Napier a shrill cry ran out through the city, Kawekakea’s close friend Jenny had been kidnapped.
Kawekakea jumped on to his trusty steed Steve and rode off to save Jenny.
Kawekakea found tracks which led to a cave. He realised that evil Billy had kidnapped Jenny duh duh duh duh duh.
Kawekakea fought evil Billy. The battle was fierce until he beat evil Billy with a final blow yaaaaaaaaaaaay! 
After that they rode back to Napier on Kawkakea’s trusty steed Steve.
Anti-Cyberbullying Day
On Friday we had a big discussion on Cyberbullying because March 30th 2007 was officially Stop Cyberbullying Day.
We talked about cyberbullying and did some brainstorming about it. Here’s some of our discussion notes.
Our Scribe of The Week will post some more of the discussions later.
Why should we help stop Cyberbullying?
It’s doesn’t feel good to be on the receiving end of it.
It can have a depressing effect on some people.
It can make people feel afraid.
We’ll miss out on the good things on the Internet.
It’s just plain wrong!
Image from Scott McLeod
