Cool Kids For A Cool Climate

 

The Childnet Awards 2003

Lizo Mzimba, Larry Magid and Sarah

When I saw the Childnet Awards advertised in a local magazine I never thought I had any chance of winning, but I entered anyway - Why not try!

I was totally amazed when they contacted me some weeks later to say that I had been shortlisted. All those shortlisted were to spend a week in London, meeting Childnet, their sponsors - Cable & Wireless, and each other.

We had a chance to find out about each other's projects, take place in 'master' classes with Cable & Wireless and see the sights of London. On our first day in London BBC Newsround came to film us for their programme. They had their own Newsround Viewers Vote and we all did 30 seconds to the camera to promote our website.

The ceremony took place in the Science Museum. All the winners had a chance to show off their websites to the invited audience. My third place award was presented to me by Lizo Mzimba from Newsround and Larry Magid from CBS News who was a judge for the individual category.

To see a list of all the winners checkout the Childnet website.

Larry Magid edited a newspaper with photos and articles done by the winners as their view of what happened on each of the days.

Andrew Fei, creator of Kidzdom is interviewed for Newsround picture by Sarah Bowler

Childnet have been hugely supportive. Not only have they taken my project seriously enough to pay for the planting of 110 trees to reflect the flights of other winners to the Awards ceremony, but they have helped me to find this web hosting. The Childnet trees have now been planted at Kingstone School, Barnsley.

Childnet has also given me the chance to meet new friends. One of the other winners, creator of www.kidzdom.com, Andrew Fei from Australia has been an enormous help with the creation of this new, improved website. He has helped me with instructions for Flash animation and talked through all sorts of problems via MSN Messenger. This would never have happened without Childnet. Check out Andrew's site - in particular his guitar animation (www.kidzdom.com/guitar.html) that he made for me of one of my favourite bands - Jump.

After having the chance to visit award winners Great Ormond Street Hospital and meet some of their website contributors - the patients, we took part in a press photo shoot with Carol Vordeman.

Childnet Academy winners for 2005 are now on the website.

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