Thank you to all who voted in the WIN A LAPTOP story competition. Congratulations to Nanzi Siyo for receiving the most votes on her touching story: The Pleasure of Self-Mutilation. She wins herself a laptop to write more stories! We wish her all the best in penning her journey to healing and being a voice of hope to her peers.

ONE SOUTH AFRICAN STUDENT  WILL WIN A LAPTOP! and YOU can decide who: Leave a comment to this post  - with your name and the country you are from -  and let us know what you think which story should win!! ----- STORY 01: How we became.. (Written by Bulana) >> Read it here ----- STORY 02: Life is a journey to the bright future (Written by Mfundo) >> Read it here ----- STORY 03: The pleasure of Self-mutilation (Written by Nanzi) >> Read it here ----- STORY 04: Absence of fatherhood (Written by Odwa) >> Read it here ----- STORY 05: The feeling of being lonely (Written by Kabelo) >> Read it here ----- STORY 06: If life were a cartoon (Written by Nelson) >> Read it here ----- STORY 07: Robbed off.. (Written by Zikhona) >> Read it here ----- STORY 08: No longer! (Written by Sbuja) >> Read it here ----- STORY 09: One of "them" (Written by Themby) >> Read it here

I have a dream about my career not dreams like most people do then they got into a cage that they are stuck of choosing at the end on which dream that they must go for. My dream is to be a guy that is dreaming the world of the new technology. I want to work with computers for the rest of my life. Everyday I am on my cell phone because I haven’t own a computer yet, just surfing the net and figuring how it works and how it is operating. Fast cars, I like them so much and even dreaming of driving one. I like racing as I like competing at school, actually doing that with myself. I want to drive. I would love to own a house that is designed by me, because I love things that I own and one day say “That thing was designed by me”. And not thinking of marrying, the reason would be because I love my job than anything else. I also want to be a body builder and even be part of the World Wrestling. By the one and only, Siphe Mananga (Mr. Nice Guy). My dream is to ...

We have learned today about the rights of text and photographs. We now know that we can not just copy a text from somewhere or find an image from the internet and post it online with our post. We have learned about the Creative commons and have learned that within the creative commons there are different restrictions. (for example...some people say that you can use their photo, but not to make a profit, others do not mind at all what you do with it). We know that before we download an image we first look at the 'copyright' sign that is stated with it! We also know now that we can not just take pictures of people and post them online without their permission. Ha ha ...look at the picture with this post...we don't mind that we all act funny and appear online that way...other people do. Here's is some more introductions for you: Spha My name is Sphamandla. I am a student in cosat, and I live in Cape Town in the township of Khayelitsha. I live with my grand and my 4 uncles with are my grandma's children. My dream is to become a docter one day. Xila I'm xila, I live at Site C, ...

What do you think of our new design?? The boy on the left hand side on our website is the brother of Nkosikhona. He is actually a bit younger then we are. We are thinking of replacing that image in the future, but we really like it for now. Today we had 2 new students joining the team...which gives us a team of 24 now here in South Africa! We learned how to add an image to a post today. Some of us started to work on our first blogpost (Siphe is writing about the 2010 worldcup, Tash about the political challenges in SA) Here's some more introductions that we have put on our personal profiles: Qiqa Hi ,I am so happy to work with you guys in students for humanity. I am really committed about this project because I want to make a huge difference in South Africa and world wide. The reason why I joined this project is because I want to learn new things. Sbuja I grew up in the Rural area and came to live in the Khayelitsha townships in Cape Town, with my mother and siblings. I love drawing although sometimes I think I lost my touch. Wonga Hi, I'm Wonga and 17yrs old, I'm ...

We now have 22 students involved in this Students for Humanity project. Today was our 3d online media class. We started by setting up our students for humanity mail address via google-apps. This was fun. Most of us had never used any email program before. So we had some time to send each other some nice (mostly Valentine) mails. After that we all created a profile on Wordpress admin. We explored what a back-end (where we can add information online) and a front-end (what you can see online) of a website is. We explored how the Wordpress system works. We now know how we can create our own post. The internet at the school is so slow! But we are just creative with the tools that we have....there are more computers then people...so we increase our speed by using two different computers to browse the web. Flickr and youtube are unfortunately blocked...we'll have to arrange something with the college. (the computer room that we are using is at the False Bay college in Khayelitsha. Computers are donated by Dell. Great stuff) What about meeting some of us? Here are some profiles so far: Ntombie Simple bt yt complicated. If u learn u will find interestin things ...

What I did on the 7th of February 2009.. I learned more about blogging, how to create your own web site. We looked at registering a domain, hosting a site and setting up free software on a domain or creating a site from scratch. After today I became more interested in this project because I would love to have my own web site. I think that this project is going to succeed because I see that everyone is interested in this project. We also started thinking about the logo and the colors of the site.

We (= Twenty grade 11 students of the Center of Science and Technology in Township Khayelitsha and Fre) had our first class of online media together! We are exploring ways how technology and online media can make a difference in our communities. We use mobile phones to source stories (about: communities, community organizations, politics, environment, technology/innovation, environment, entrepreneurship, ..) and post them online on this blog (a Wordpress Multi user site). Today we explored some possibilities of the internet, we looked at Google, Wikipedia, and the concept of blogging. We also talked about the impact that words have on other people, how they can harm our own image, have an impact on other people and easily can be misinterpreted by other people. We explored the 'ownership' of words online. The fact that the whole world is able to see what we are writing about. We created the categories for this blog that we want to report about and gave them a name.