Have a Good Life

UPDATE: Second video of another teacher added.

For our Sub for Santa drive the students at my school set a goal to raise more than $11,000! I volunteered my legs for waxing if they met that goal. They did! Here is the video. Enjoy, I did. It didn't hurt that bad, but I had to play it up for the students to enjoy it more. There is no audio, but I hope my face tells the story. Pictures here.

First of all, thanks to all of you who told me how much rice you donated on your own yesterday. At school, we had students down in the computer lab all day in 15-minute shifts. There were 37 computers going full steam all day. We raised just over 750,000 grains of rice for freerice.com. We had a great time and we thank everyone who participated. There was almost 50,000 donated by people not at our school. All in all, it was a lot of fun.

I mentioned this website earlier and wanted to mention it again. My class has gone to great lengths to set the day aside to help raise rice for the United Nations. They wrote a proposal to the administration, they planned out a schedule, made permission slips to teachers, and passes back from the library. I am so proud of how hard they worked. So, a lot of students will be filtering into the library to go to Freerice.com and see how much rice we can to donate to the United Nations. The totals for the past few days are in the image below.



If you have a chance, please spend a couple minutes there and pad our stats. ;)

My students would really appreciate your help.

In other news. The SWAT team wiki is up and running. It looks great. The students have done almost all of that all by themselves. They are doing a remarkable job! Stay posted for the website for gratitude if we can ever figure out how to get the form to work.

Be sure to hit the SWAT team wiki link above to see how the class is doing. The temporary site for the "website for gratitude" is here. It was designed by my students, and I will let them take the reins on it.

Also, here is a neat little video about blogs. It is so well done and very creative. I love how it doesn't use any screenshots or visit any webpages to teach about blogs. So cool!

Well, my students discussed, brainstormed, and came up with some great ideas for how to make a difference.

One girl, the resident genius, suggested what I think is the best idea. She wants to make a website for gratitude. People will be able to go to the website and type in a message of gratitude to someone. The web form will then email that message to the recipient. I think it is a great idea. Hopefully, it will work.

The next idea was to do something with Freerice.com. After talking about it, we decided we would try to have the library full all day with shifts of students trying to raise rice for the United Nations. I think it will work really well, but we might not have enough time.

The last idea is one that I came up with, but it will still help. I gave the kids the idea, but they have done most of the work so far. They are making a SWAT team wiki. It will be a place that students can go to for information and tutoring. It is a big project, also. We will be working on this all year. I am very excited about it. I did blogs with my students last year, and I think this will be a good thing to do.

There are a lot of great things about the internet. I really love it. This little girl is trying to make a difference. "I can make a difference by..." is the theme for this year's Refections contest, which is put on by PTA's throughout the nation (apparently). She is trying to make a difference by doing small things, but it turning out to be much larger. Check out her blogroll of people that are helping or at least talking about it. This kind of stuff is fascinating. I will have to brainstorm with my kids tomorrow to see what we can do to win this really neat prize.

For the most part, my students were very good for the week that I was gone. There were a couple punk kids, but other than that, they did great. They were very respectful to the sub. When I walked in the door, this was waiting on my board. I thought it was pretty nice.

Then, my 3rd period students had this waiting for me, too, along with a couple gifts for the kids.