5/6C’s Class Blog 2008

In November most of our grade six student will be heading to our national capital, Canberra, for four days of looking, learning and laughing as they see the sights and attractions of this special city which was designed by American architect Walter Burley Griffin.

Some of the highlights of the tour will be Anzac Parade (in the foreground of the photo), Old Parliament House (in the centre of the photo) and New Parliament House on the low hill behind that, topped by the massive flagpole and a flag which is 12.8m by 6.4 metres, or roughly the size of a double decker bus!

Other highlights of the tour include a visit to Telstra Tower, Questacon, the National Museum and the Australian War Memorial.

Image: The house that Australia built
Originally uploaded by Teon

Who links to my website?

Making a graph of information can often help to give a clearer picture of what data you have or how parts of it connect to other parts. We’ve made graphs of our height, how we use our time, temperature over a day and many other sets of data. Here’s a new twist on graphs though – graph your website!

Plugging your site’s URL into this page will produce a graph of your content – it’s really interesting to watch the picture being constructed on your screen. I made graphs of our blog and our wiki; they look quite different, because the structure of each site is so different.  If you want to see some more amazing shots, there are more than two thousand posted here on Flickr.

  Here is another interesting tool which converts your site to a picture that looks like a DNA sample. According to the site,  ”WEB2DNA will take you website, analyze it, crunch it to little bits and spit it out as a graphic representation of a human DNA.” I think the most interesting part of this is, like the graphs above, comparing the pictures of different sites. Here are the WEB2DNA pictures of our blog and wiki:

 There are hundreds of other examples of sites pictured with WEB2DNA here on Flickr. 

So, has anyone found any other cool sites that change your webpages to graphics? Please let us know if you have!

Mrs C found an interesting site for sending unusual greetings: Geogreetings. The program uses buildings that look like letters, from around the world, to make up any phrase or message you like, up to 40 letters. Then you get a link to an animated page that spells out your message – very cool.

Click on the image above to see how it works.

 (Not to be confused with the US Election)

Fourth term will be full, busy and fun. We will be learning about the Australian government system and running our own election campaign in our school. Students will be devising a platform to run on and a detailed advertising campaign which will include television, radio and print media ads. Each team will put their media on their wiki pages for other teams to examine, then there will be a press conference where all teams present their work. Finally, there will be THE ELECTION, where all students and teachers cast their ballots and determine the winning party.

Term four will also see most of our Grade 6 students travelling to Canberra for a four day camp, after which they will be preparing for Graduation in December. Grade 5 students will be preparing to take on their role as senior students next year.

Stay tuned for further developments!

The Blogging Competition has begun! We started a little late with term holidays taking up the first two weeks and then Edublogs being in meltdown mode for the last week, but all should now be ready. Grade 5/6C students, aim to complete a task each week – it doesn’t matter what task and in your first week you have 4 to choose from, so there should be something that appeals to all of you. You will need to timetable your blog comp activities and computer access in your personal learning plan for the week.

Mega-thanks to Miss Wyatt in Tassie for the huge amount of work she’s put in to get this competition up and running. You’re a champ, Miss W!

• Competition Info

• Participant List

• Weekly Activities

 Image by Lara604 licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

Even though we are into the last term of the 2008 school year (and hasn’t it flown by!) I think it’s never too late to adopt a class mascot. While shopping on Friday night these little guys jumped into my trolley and begged to be taken to school – how could I say no to them?
Their names are Mr Happy and Little Miss Sunshine (awww, how sweet. Just like 5/6C!). I’m not sure what we’ll actually do with them; that will be for the class to decide on Monday.

Or should that heading be “Another Visitor Kilometrestone”? Maybe milestones never went metric!

Today, October 2, our visitor counter ticked over to 11,111, or eleven thousand, one hundred and eleven.  That’s a lot of visitors! Our counter began on January 2, so it’s been counting for 9 months or 265 days. That means we get, on average, 42 visitors each day! Wow!

Here are some facts about 11,111:

• it’s a palindrome
• it has at least 4 factors (1, 41, 271, 11111) so it’s composite.
• it ends in 1, so it’s odd
• if you square it, the answer is 123,454,321 (another palindrome)

Can you find any other interesting facts about 11,111?

Mrs C has been playing with a new tool, Zoho Creator. It’s tricky but she thinks she’s got the basics worked out, sort of anyway. She used the tool to make the Blog user survey below – please fill in the form! Thanks,

The first week of the holidays is almost over already – as the saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun! What is everyone up to in the holidays?

This illustration was made using Spell with Flickr. A very cool tool. The images used are from Flickr groups which specialise in collecting photos of letters, digits and punctuation marks.  I found the link on Division 16’s blog, Huzzah. They are a grade 6 class in Canada who have been blogging for a couple of weeks. They have a great blogroll which includes many student and grade blogs, including ours!