Hi, folks!

 First of all, congrats on a successful presentation, I got messages from Dennis and Moira with compliments on our work…J Then I started thinking about how to go on with our project, since it might seem very easy to involve our students in going on participating actively…., but how? Would “let’s go on tagging” or “now we will see what RSS is all about” be good proposals to motivate and engage them ? I would say “NO”. I would say we should try to find engaging topics which might spur them into further action.

Some time ago I came across “serendipitous discoveries” in Wikipedia, a long list of interesting findings in the history of mankind, made by mere chance. And the topic has now come back to my mind as a possible common task we might share. If it reads appealing to YOU, dear colleagues, of course. I proposed the idea to my students today, and these are the steps I suggested, which, apparently, they accepted most willingly:

• Do a search on serendipitous discoveries.  
• Choose one serendipitous discovery that you find amazing/ peculiarly interesting and post a comment on it in your blog/ our class blog.  
• Look for a serendipitous experience you’ve gone through in your life, or ask your parents/relatives to tell you an engaging serendipitous story.  
• Share your story with us!

   

  If you agreed on making it a joint project, we might invite more students from different backgrounds to join us, all of them tagging their postings “serendipity”. Eventually, we might get a good collection of serendipitous stories to share, and we might make a selection, appointing a group of students representing each country to be the “assessors/ members of a jury” to decide who deserves to be the “winner”. I have just developed an idea which can be polished, definitely, and which I would be very grateful to see polished by any or all of you so that we can go on working together in this joint venture. Would your students be interested in a topic like this? Please, feel free to suggest any changes and/or amendments you can think of, for the benefit of our students. But, mainly, for the benefit of being able to go on exploring all these tools further.

Rita