Voices of the World

After much persuasion I have managed to get Sharon to agree to let me lead the Voices of the World project for the foreseeable future.

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Voices of the World is a project that was set up to connect children in classrooms worldwide.  The use of voice to do this posed two benefits

• children will be able to relate better to other children when hearing the spoken word rather than the written word; this makes the other schools seem more real
• children will be able to develop an appreciation for the different languages, dialects and accents around the world (Tonner, 2007)

The community has been established for almost three years at present and many of the first members are still active participants.  It is the responsibility of the leader to create monthly tasks which are posted for completion by members with their classes.  At the end of the month tasks are all submitted to the leader for posting on the wikispace.

I have been in the role of leader for almost a month now and I am enjoying it greatly.  Everyone that I have spoken with involved in the project is very enthusiastic and I hope to try out some new additional elements within the community.  To achieve this I have created an additional area with an introductory task related to the monthly task.  We have 6 classes creating 2 acrostic poems collaboratively.  All 6 classes are contributing to both poems and the poems are going to be tri-lingual.

Following the recent announcement that ning will no longer operate a free service we are investigating alternative hosting for the teachers' area of the project.

I will be posting more on my experiences with Voices of the World so keep a watch for further updates.