Make mine international, please

    A couple of the schools we visited on our site visits last week impressed me with their international “feel,” and I’ve been thinking about how we can bring more international connections into our curriculum here (both in the library and in general).   So I was pleased to rediscover the Newseum (a news museum that will open in the fall in D.C.) which has a handy tool on their site–a daily display of 576 newspaper front pages.   (This site has been around for awhile, but they have […]

Time to learn and share

As I sift through my thoughts from the site visits this past week, the theme that keeps recurring to me is the different ways the schools we visited supported either their teachers or their students, or both. Every school we visited had a non-traditional schedule, including our last site, Mt. Carmel, which I haven’t had time to write about.  This provided for both tutorial time for students within the school day as well as teacher staff development time within the school day.   I really liked […]

Don’t you love it when they improve tools

  Pbwiki just emailed me that they have added a new point/click editor to their site that makes it even easier for you to add content to a wiki site. They’ve included a point and click format similar to other collaborative sites, with easy gadgets for inserting videos, photostories, calendars, stock quotes, chat windows, etc. (If you have an existing wiki, they’ll email you asking if you want to update it to the new editor). I’ve found using wikis a very easy way to collaborate […]

Becoming “clickable”

   In his workshop, Will Richardson mentioned that one way to network outside the campus is to become “clickable” or findable on the web. You could create your own blog (at edublogs.org or blogger.com) or a wiki (at pbwiki.com or wikispaces.com)–or you could create a learning laboratory for your students on PageFlakes. Page Flakes (similar to Google home page or My Yahoo) lets you create your own personalized news and media page.  You could create one for your class or subject area, and pull in only articles, video, […]

Greatest thing since sliced bread?

I was talking with a group of teachers yesterday, and one remarked, ‘I just love the internet.’  Everyone sitting there concurred immediately.   Another teacher commented now when her students ask her something, she can just turn to her computer and immediately find the answer instead of telling them, she doesn’t know or isn’t sure.  Now, I know this amazement over the internet might be scoffed at as old hat, but I decided today is a day to acknowledge how this tool is changing the classroom, […]

Apple, inc.

Ok, so Apple has just blown the lid off.  They have announced the new iPhone, which uses a touch screen rather than keys, allows you to skip through voice mails visually, includes internet and email, and has music, photos, and video like an iPod.   They are partnering with Google, Yahoo, and Cingular to bring all the features to fruition.  It’s like one “mega” company. Besides the obvious leap in technology which will transform what our students can do, what struck me most was something Google’s […]

Apple’s new product? and mobile computing

Apple will announce some new product tomorrow at CES (Consumer Electronics Association show) Macworld and it is reputed to be the Ipod phone or an Apple phone/computer  or tablet of some kind. (If you are very curious about this announcement, Engadget is carrying a live feed) The New York Times article about the shrinking of computing devices, A Personal Computer to Carry in a Pocket, discusses the Apple product as well as other new small devices like the Oqo handheld that uses Windows CES and […]

Google earth

I hadn’t really put together the potential for Google Earth in my mind until I saw a workshop about a math teacher using it for an interactive math lesson that he created and then saw Joel’s workshop for Project Tech a few weeks ago.  I felt a little bewildered by how to use the basics of the software until I discovered this set of self-paced training videos created by Richard Treves at Southampton University.   To learn more about using Google earth, watch the video demos on Southhampton’s site–at least […]

Photostory

I feel like someone arriving late to the party when I saw this teacher’s post on what her students did with Photostory.   For some reason, I just didn’t fully get all of the curricular applications of Photostory (which by the way, is installed in our computer labs). Students created Photostory presentations of their interpretation of Romanticism, incorporating art, music and poetry.   It’s similar to using Powerpoint, but it’s refreshing to see a different software being used because it does create a different and more active feel […]

A “novel” wiki

Here’s an excellent example of a wiki created at Woodward Academy for the study of a  novel, Hannalee. (this is courtesy of Weblogg-ed where I always find fascinating tips!) You can see how the sidebar pages are organized so that they are information aids(like tours and historical information) to support the study of the novel. Check out some of the sidebar pages–The students created artwork for the idioms and figures of speech page, played the piano to illustrate a song of the period and recorded that for the “Aura Lee” page, wrote […]