About two months ago, my class used Google Lively to teach seventh graders about digital citizenship. Now Google is shutting it down and we've been engaged in a protest against Google about shutting us down. We've created a blog called the digiteendreamteam to communicate and tell the world what's going on. We've all contributed to the project in so many ways. I visited other blogs and commented on what they've been saying about us. It seems to work and we're getting a lot of support.
In Lively, you can create rooms to hang out in. I never did create a room, but my favorite room was the westwood hangout. It was a giant turn-table with a record spinning in the center of the room. You could also create avatars. Mine was named JohnyReb.
To get support for our blog, we all went to different blogs to tell people about our protest. We even started sending e-mails to TV shows. I sent one to the Today Showtelling them about the struggle to save Lively. We're hoping to gain support from them.
To gain support for a blog, there are many measures you must make. You need a catchy name so that people will be interested in it, you need to blog a lot so it doesn't get boring, and you need to look at other people's comments to see how popular it is. There are also ways to analyze the blog. One way is to go to the website called technorati. This website is a search engine for blogs and will rank the blogs you want to see. Another way is the stat-camera. This device counts who has visited your page in your recent history. These things help tell you how popular blogs can be. They can also show just how popular and effective blogging can be.
There are many ways you can tell people about your blog. The thing we did was go to other blogs and linked to ours so they would know who we are. Another way is to make a video to get the word out, but linking to the other blogs seems to be more effective.
This protest has deffinately been worth the effort. I've learned that no matter how big a company is, you can still stand up to it for what you believe in. I would tell people who say that using computers to teach their kids should be private so that nothing can be deleted, at least not by the outside world. I fully agree that Web 2 should be used in classrooms to teach kids.
We've started looking for more virtual worlds to use when Lively is gone. I think we should use opensim on reactiongrid. We have already built an island in it and it looks cooler than Lively. Even though this virtual world may be better, we will never forget Lively.
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