Power of the Mind

Hello everyone.

Censoring is a thing that certian people (a.k.a censorers) do to things that they think are not good to be viewed by certian people because it is not appropriate for them. Some examples of things that might be censored would be nudity, intense violence, swears, rude gestures, and offencive phrases. There is also the matter of what age of people things are censored for. Mostly being for young children, some movies and rated inappropraite for that age of kids. Another example would be some song, because before they go on the radio, they usually have to be censored and the swears edited our before they are aloud to be played. Pictures, movies or paintings that display nudity sometimes have little black boxes over the naked parts of the men/women/man/woman.

Here is a link to some songs that have been censored.

And here is a picture that has been censored as well

Hello everyone.

To Stefano, Luis Carlos, Farhad, and Gino, who I have been working with in the last couple of months from Columbia, Virginia and Kuala Lumpur, I just wanted to say that I have had a lot of fun making this video and that it would not have been possible without all of your help.

On Friday (today is Monday), our teacher asked us 4 questions about our videos which I am now going to answer for all to here.

This post is about my reflection on the finished video on terrorism that I and my world-wide partners worked on for the months of March and April. I think that overall we did an excellent job in putting together all the different pieces of this of this massive project.

“What have you learned about your topic?”

One thing that I have learned about my topic is that terrorists would most likely not have committed these crimes, had they not been pushed to the edge of there limits. Had the world helped them in there time of need in a different way other than bringing troops into their country and killing people, things might have turned out differently…

“What have you learned about collaborating locally and internationally?”

 Collaborating locally is much easier and different than collaborating internationally, as I found out in the last two months. When you are working with any group of people that are any distance away from you, it makes things more difficult because then there is the matter of communication. You may want to go and do something one way and go ahead and do it, then find out the next day that you buddy wanted to do something else instead. Doing projects this way has the advantage of getting many different points of view and that many more heads for ideas but it also has its draw-backs about having to confirm everything with the other people that you are working with which makes the process move a whole lot slower than normal.

“What would have made this project easier/better/more interesting?”

            The project would have been better if there was an easier way for me and the other kids in my group to communicate better, but other than that, I doubt playing around with computers and learning to handle this new kind of soft-ware couldn’t be any more fun!

“What have you learned about telling a story combining pictures/text/music/video/voice?”

            For me, I always hated it when a teacher assigned the class to hand write a story about this or that. But the world and the way we do things is changing, some things for the better, and other for the worst. But from my mind’s eye’s view, text and story telling has defiantly changed for the better. I have learned so much for doing this project that I don’t think I would have enough time in the day to write it all, so I will just give you the more important things. One, I learned how working with people form other parts of the world is like and how much fun it is to hear different opinions and ideas. Two, I learned how to gather information for a video, put it all together and put it out on the internet. Three, I learned to work and run computers and computer soft-ware.     

 Making this radio play was by far the most fun assignment that we have done so far this year. It was something that people all over the world could listen to and enjoy, which made it all the more important to do properly. When the finished project was out on the web to listen to (http://www.divshare.com/download/318154-13ahttp:/www.divshare.com/download/318154-13a)

 I had found that at certain parts, we either needed to be farther away form the microphone or closer to it. But other than that I thought it was alright, even great. It was a lot harder than anyone (me and my group members, Shyla and Tyler) thought it would be. One of the harder things that we had to overcome was our differences. We each wanted it to sound to our liking. But in the end we even managed to work that out, deciding to work together

Hello Grade 5 students, in this post I will answer the following questions the best I can:

When you post, where do you get your ideas for the post’s topic?

What is your favorite or most interesting thing that you like about blogging?

What makes you want to comment on a blog?

Does blogging help you more in writing and language?

Answers:

1.When I write a post, I usually get my topic ideas from either my teacher or

 something interesting that has happened recently in my life. But there are also other ways to get topic ideas for a good blog post. You could try and find a good topic to write a post on by surfing the net and using google or any other search engines that you can think of. Or, if you are interested in, say, getting your community more in touch with the world, you could go and interview people on their opinions, their knowledge on certain topics or even about the history of the place you live in, which would give enough information to make a whole new blog if you were dedicated enough.

     2.For my favorite thing about blogging, I would have to say the ability to communicate with other people from around the world at anytime of the day. It helps to connect people in whole new ways that 10-20 years ago, nobody thought was even possible. But my favorite thing about blogging and the most interesting thing about blogging for me are two different things completely. So to better answer your question, I will tell you about the thing that I find most interesting about blogging is that you can learn so many more things so much faster, while still being careful that you are really getting true information of course.

     3.Commenting is the key ingredient to successful blogging. If you do not receive comments, then how will you even hope to fix your blog and learn new things? The same goes for giving comments. When you leave a comment for someone on one of their posts, your should be leaving your opinion on what you think on what that person has to say on that topic. What makes me want to comment on someone’s blog is how what that person is saying affects my view of things. For example, say someone has written a post that talks about Velcro (the stuff that you use if you can’t tie laces) and how it grows in fields (I give credit to my teacher for the idea). Now you and I both know that Velcro does not grow in fields but bear with me because this is only an example. Anyways, suppose I leave this person a comment saying that Velcro DOES NOT grow in fields and that it is made in factories of manufacturing plants. Now this person knows that he/she was wrong and will probably fix his/her error and he/she has learned something.

    4.Yes it certainly does! Blogging can give you a larger vocabulary, enhance your writing skills and even help you in reading so that you understand what you read better. In the future, I think that schools would be much better off teaching kids their ELA (English Language Arts) on computers, typing and blogging. But you would still have to learn to write and stuff first. 

I am here today to write about the different challenges and advantages of working with kids in different countries over the internet.

Some of the challenges that I have encountered when I was working on the my groupes wiki page was that if I disagreed with any of the other peoples ideas, I couldn’t ask him right then and there if I could use something else instead.

If, say, you want to edit a certian page on the wiki and someone else from a different country is already working on it, then you can’t really phone them up and tell them to get off or ask them how long they plan on being like you could if they lived in the same place as you.

So the biggest difficulty in doing a progect like this is the problem of communication between the different groups.

But for every challenge, it seems there is at least one advantage to be found! For one thing, the entire group has a wider range of ideas and palces to look for them and for another thing, the kids get a chance to work with people of different cultures that have different ways of doing things so that the others could learn form them.

Another one of the many advantages of doing stuff like this would be that kids would make new friends and in many ways, bring the world closer together.

Hello readers, new and old!

So first of all, I would like to know how all of your holidays were.

Mine was terrific and to make it even sweeter, I get to go to the Dominican Republic in Febuary sometime!!:)

Over the two weeks that we got off of school here in Snow Lake, I was lazy all threw the first week, more actice than i have ever been during the second and became the biggest grump during the last few days (thats how much I want to kill the guy that invented the first school!). But like I said, during the second week I was crazy. I had tyhe best New Years party ever with Randy and Michael were we ate at least enough food to fill 5 fat guys and played video games almost the whole time.

Don’t forget to tell me about your holidays too!

Hi,

ATTENTION: Calling all POWER OF THE MIND readers!

Just in case anyone of you have not heard of this site, here is its adress:

Infoaeststics

Now here is where I want you all to go to after you have reached the web site

Search for a post called Flickr Time. Now read this cool post. It may not be very long, but its subject is one of the colest things i have ever seen! Here is a link to the actua site. All you have to do is type in two of your favorite things and then it will put up a clock made out of pictures that relate to the things you have typed in. Flickr Clock.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!!!!!!!

Hello to all my adoring fans out there and to those who are new to reading my blog posts.

Today in class we did this presentation on an imitation of an interview about animal extinction. Me (staring as the interviewer) and two other class mates (staring as the hunter from Nebraska and the veterinarian from Winnipeg) had started practicing about two days before today and we all did pretty well in my opinion. But now down to serious matters. The point of this post and me writing it is about the fact that the animals of our planetned our help in being saved from people who want to see them dead in exchange for cold hard ca$h.

So as you can see, many animals need our help in their fight for survival.

Please help to stop unessesary poaching and hunting!

Man has been using fossils for around 120 years now since the industry revolution back in the 1880’s. But now here, in the 21st century, we are in big trouble. The fossil fuels that we take for granted are dissappearing and fast! With the growing demand for them, the fossil fuels are getting harder and harder to find. The only way to preserve fossil fuels is to find an alternative source of energy that we can use instead of the fossil fuels thats we have been using ever-so-fast. I hope that when we find this “alternative” for nature resources, it will be one that does not pollute the earth and will be renewable, just like solar energy, wind energy and hydro electricity.

Here is a link that will bring u to a site that will show a little something on solar energy…     SOLAR ENERGY ROCKS!!!!

The sun is a powerful thing…

Have you ever heard of project (RED)?

I know that alot of you have already but for those of you that don’t I will expain. Project (RED) is sometyhing that Bono (the lead singer in U2) started by trying to convince some of the bigger and more powerful companies like Apple and Gap to start making products that are red and give a small portion of its profit towards AIDS in Africa.

The Nata Village blog in Africa has a post about this project (RED)  and is a site that you should visit if you want to get into helping to stop AIDS in Africa and other third-world countries. So please visit this site and help in the enomous effort to stop Disease and poverty in third-world countries and get INSPI(RED), EMPOW(RED), DISCOV(RED) and ADMI(RED)!!!!