Just a quick post to share an idea that I’ve stolen magpied from a fellow teacher. I have asked and she is fine for me to do so and I am not claiming this to be my own idea at all. I am just taking it and developing it.I will link back to her work when this idea comes to fruition.
It all started yesterday morning when I saw a tweet from a teacher in New Zealand asking if anyone had a home for her class pet, Trevor. He travels the world by self drive, spending a few weeks in different schools. While there, his hosts (the children) write about his journey, their area and country and they post pictures. You can see Trevor’s adventures here: http://trevjunior.edublogs.org/
Now I thought this was great and set about planning which teacher at school I would ask. I have lots of contacts on Twitter so the bear would have plenty of holiday homes around the UK to visit. But then I thought, what if others want to do the same? So I started thinking about planning a website to host it al so that anyone can get a bear and send it to another school.
With @mattlovegrove’s help, we will have one main site that explains how it all works and links to the blogs and then teachers can signup to blogs for their class pet. People can also offer their class as a possible holiday destination too. This could be done through a simple google form for example. The pets (and their children) can then decide where to send him to next.The site will be based on WordPress and full of guides to show how to blog, upload pictures, videos etc.
While he is away on holiday, there can be lots of communication between the two classes, building community cohesion/global awareness/whatever box you want to tick but mainly getting the children enthused about the world around them. We could also build up a google map for each bear’s travels so far. Then when the holiday is over, he may go back to his home class or he may go on to another holiday.(Maybe they could have a passport?)
We’ll start slowly, we’ve only just finished the initial conversation but I think we should have something to show in a little while.
So do you think your class pet needs a holiday? Could you get an additional pet just for travelling?
Now what do we call this? classpetholidays.com? bearsthattravel.com? Any ideas?
Great idea! As they won’t necessarily be bears how about petsthattravel or travellingpets? We did this with some schools in France about 5 years ago & the kids loved it. We don’t have a class pet maybe we should get one & participate 🙂
This is such a simple yet enjoyable way to get more teachers and their classes into blogging. I’ll follow this with interest and hope to get one or two staff in my own school to participate.
Sounds like a great idea, you could do this out of teh box with http://primaryblogger.co.uk, that way you don’t need to worry about any technical stuff 🙂
I love this idea! We have a mascot that goes home with a different child each week and they write in a diary that they share with the class on a Monday. But I’d love to have a class pet to send to other schools and would be more than happy to have pets come to our school. We haven’t started blogging at our school yet so this would be a good introduction to it.