Noumea sailing

Hi guys,

Have had three days of training with the coach and getting used to the conditions. Tomorrow is the regatta which is four days long. It is one of their major regattas.

It is very different sailing conditions. At 6am there is no breeze and steadily builds till 11am when it so windy we lose our hats. Then at about three it slowly begins to die.

Its really hot, we are drinking lots and lots of water. We start sailing at 10 and finish at 4. The teams from Wallis and Fortuna (North of Fiji) arrived yesterday and the Noumean team trained today.

At times it is quite hard to control the boat but alot of the time it is windy and very fun because we go really fast when we get surfing down the waves.

Sailing into the wind in heavy conditions will cause my boat to slowly tip and therfore I have to lean out of my boat and it looks something like this.

Yesterday our coach Briar spread Zinc on our faces and made cool designs.

We sailed this morning really early from 8am and then went to the aquarium in the afternoon.

In Noumea

Hi Guys its Craig here.

Just a quick blog post to let you know we made it to Noumea.

26+ degrees with strong winds for sailing. Excuse me if there are any mistakes. Typing on a French keyboard.

Twitter is magic!! Thanks to our supporters...

Hi everyone,

Just a quick little post from me.  Many of you may have heard of Twitter - a year ago I thought tweeting was a strange thing to do.  I must admit, I thought it was all about updating my friends about the mundane day to day things I'd been up to, not exactly compelling reading.  Then I had a go playing on Twitter, as a way to connect with other teachers... and now I'm hooked!

I've been amazed by how much learning has been sparked for me through Twitter - I love the feeling I get when I pick up an interesting piece of information, when I discover an exciting online tool, connect with a new person or am challenged in my thinking.  Learning Hub 3, you guys aren't the only ones that love learning, I assure you!

This evening Ken (who works as a manger at the Hamilton Zoo) got in touch with me to congratulate you all on reaching 20,000 blog hits and I very cheekily asked him for a favour.  

As you're all aware, Ruby and Paton are hard at work creating a fabulous wiki on endangered animals and Ken is happy for them to email questions through to him.  He's even going to put them in touch with the people who look after the native, exotic and endangered animals!!  

The internet allows people to make connections that otherwise wouldn't have happened.  I think we're so lucky to be learning in a time when information and experts are so accessible and even luckier that there are a growing number of people out there that are happy to make a difference by jumping in and helping us out.

I've been thinking recently and have been feeling so proud and excited to be part of such a giving community - we would not have made it to 20,000 hits within our first year had it not been for so many people taking an interest in what we're doing... many of these are people that we haven't even met in real life.

So thank you to all of our supporters for the encouragement and, well, support!  We think you rock!!

Getting out of the Pit!

Here at Stonefields we use our seven learner dispositions to help us when we get stuck in our learning.  Courtney made this great diagram to show how we get out of the pit!

We love to make mistakes and feel the stretch from being in the pit, because that's how we do our best learning.


Also, Finn and Courtney were invited to speak to a large group of professionals and did so last night - what an honor!

We've met our goal of 20,000 hits! Go us!!!

Hi it's Hossain here,

We have reached our goal number and we are going to have a huge celebration!

In term 3 we had 5,000 Pageviews and the teachers said that if we get to 20,000 we will have a party!

We got 20,000 by putting comments on other blogs and then they will comment on our blog, so we put more comments and got more pageviews.

Thank you very much everyone for your support - we love that you like reading our blog entries and we love writing it for you!  We want to keep blogging until we get a million hits because we love it that much!

Let's celebrate!!!!

Google Docs - are you in the cloud?

In LH3 we use Google Docs for a lot of our learning - it's an amazing tool that allows us to collaborate on the same document from anywhere, on any type of computer.

If you're not already using it (and it's free!) have a look at this video below and please ask us any questions.  We'd be happy to answer them for you!

and if you're familiar with Google Docs but haven't used the Forms option - take a look at this and have a go at making your own form next time you need to collect a whole lot of information from people...

Sid's Bath

Today after school  I needed to do a presentation at 4:30. But while I was waiting me and Miss Holland gave sid a bath.  We got the hot water and fulled it up to Sids shoulders so he could move around. I found out that some bearded dragons don't like getting water in there ears. I also found out that sid doesn't drink water it goes up his bottom so he can keep hydrated. While we were giving him a bath his skin changed to different colors but mostly yellow. We splashed water on his back to keep him warm. After that we quickly dried him in a towel so he can keep warm. I also got to give him some mealworms. Sid loves having a bath because it's nice and warm for him but he hates getting out of the bath because it's cold for him.

Giving Sid (our bearded dragon) a bath! on PhotoPeach

By Finn