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One of the projects for ROW was to create a Public Service Announcement about a natural disaster that can happen where we live. We all shared our videos on Skype!
It all started when Mrs. Abernethy applied for a grant from Lowes Toolbox for Education to get iPads for the classroom. Well, the Powerful Penguins got the grant, and they bought six mini iPads and two full-sized iPads. They have been exploring apps and creating projects ever since.
One day, Mrs. Abernethy shared a contest being held by The Foundation for Rural Services and Discovery Education called "The Connected Community Challenge." The top prize included $2,500 for technology. Immediately the students' ears perked up. They could use that money to buy more iPads for the classroom!
Basically, this was the challenge: The students needed to find a rural town somewhere in the world to compare to their rural town (Greenville, PA.) Then they needed to make a two-minute video explaining what they found. It seemed easy enough, but it wasn't!
Students worked on the project every spare minute and voluntarily stayed after school for over a month to make their video. The town they chose was a little town in Australia with a population of fifty people called Gulargambone. They learned a lot about this town, and it didn't fit easily into a two minute video. Evenutally, they met the challenge. The result is shown below.
A lot of the work put into the video really can't be seen. Students used a variety of editing programs to create the green-screened video. They kept track of where they got all of their information, videos and photos. They even contacted a photographer on Flickr who had taken pictures of the town to ask him permission to use his pictures in the video.