Whole MILI Mass

I noticed with more than a bit of envy that a whole new group of teachers and media specialists are participating in the MILI 23 Things for 2008 - 09 school year. For a variety of reasons we did not have an opportunity to join them this year. I guess I will have to live vicariously by keeping up on their blogs. It was a great sparkplug for me last year and I hope for the teachers that participated with me.

Problem Based Learning

Problem Based Learning

Began with the Medical model. Coopted by other educational genres because of its value. 

Good book on subject - Problem-Based Learning and other Curriculum Models for the Multiple Intelligences Classroom.

Sunday October 19, 2008

How can I use this to convey curriculum? As a way to
1. Add reading content to enhance my presentations
2. As an instructional conduit for when students are missing in class
3. As a link resource for students
4. For preparing ahead of time and release when ready
5.
http://wellstone.mpls.k12.mn.us

Thing 21 You Tube and more

Well, needless to say I have had trouble logging on to You Tube at school. Seems it is blocked at all the school sites in Minneapolis and beyond. Strange thing is I have found students using it so they know a work around. I have turned into quite a You Tube fan at home for all the content it contains. I really think it is a resource that should be available in schools. It is one of the tools it will take some time for the schools to become accustmed to. For all the bad content on their there is so much depthful and insightful content. As Web 2.0 continues to gain traction schools are going to have to find a way to let in the useful content while blocking that content that is not worthy of being in the schools.

Thing 35 Smart Tips

I was so fortunate to be able to attend the Public Library Association meeting yesterday. It was a great source of inspiration. So many ideas swirling around and I all I had to do was to reach out and grab a few. From the vendors floor, to the presentations to the the finale at the Audio Book Dinner the time was enlightening.

I was fortunate to stand directly behind a Minitex staff in a line for an author signing. In conversing with her I learned we could have a Minitex staff come out to present the database collection to our staff. And it is all free. What a deal. She also told be she would put the ELM emblem and link directly on our school web page so student don't have to searching for it anymore among the many links in the Student Resources section. Way cool!

I also attended a session on making libraries welcoming environments for the public to come in to. The presenter had a great speaking style which included a healthy sense of humor as well as practical tips on creating an environment that would not only make people want to stay in the library but they would also look forward to returning. Taking down all the "Do not . . ." signs and replacing them with something more attractive, say artwork. Putting displays to the right of an entry or exit is more likely to get attention than at the left. Probably the most powerful piece to this is simply to be kind and considerate of the public. Too often in this speaker's experience she has seen staff being rude or at least inattentive to the needs of people.

There were also presentations on new technology with the clever name of Technozoo. This speaker was a tad younger than the crowd he was speaking to and often put in good natured digs at the boomers. He reminded us to continually push into the Web 2.0 phenomena and never stop learning.

All in all a wonderfully invigorating day! Thank you Metronet for making this possible for me.

Thing #9 Streaming Video

I teach a careers class everyday. One of the most useful sites I have found for this is the iSeek site from the state of Minnesota. As a part of it there are videos on most any occupation one can think of all neatly placed within career clusters. I guess this would have be called a web 2.0 app that I wouldn't have done a couple years ago. Each video stream is only a minute or two long but that is perfect for giving the students a taste of the occupations out there. I am encouraging them to log in and use these in their research outside of class.

Thing #27 Customize your homepage

I am amazed at all that can be done on iGoogle. The number of add on features seems to constantly be growing. I attribute that to the open source nature of the gadgets. I especially like the listing features 'most used' so I don't have to go slogging through the morass to find decent gadgets to add. Search engines are an amazing technology especially when you consider there are over 15 billion web pages out there and they can sort through all of them in a matter of seconds. I want to find a blog feature to add to my personal page to add the bevy of interesting features I have now. I am planning presenting this to the students in the 4th quarter.

MEMOrandom

I read with interest the latest MEMOrandom online today on the efficacy on reading strategies being used in the Minneapolis Public Schools. It was enlightening to read that the Accelerated Reading program is not that effective of a strategy to improve reading. It is heavily used not only here but across the US. I think Ihave seen statistics claiming it is used in up to 60% of all elementary schools across the country. Also the Sustained Silent Reading strategy is seen as being more effective. We are currently using that strategy at Wellstone and I think the students geniunely enjoy it. We try to have a variety of reading materials but do not allow reading online. According to this research that may be misguided as young adults are doing more of their reading online. Maybe next year we will change that rule and let the students read online during SSR time.

Copyright and Plaglarism Thing #10

Here are we are in the beautiful Wellstone Library doing research on reference books. We talked about the importance of putting things in your own words and citing sources of information. It seems sometime in the digital world we emphasize the need not to copy as it is so super easy but forget to emphasize the same for printed material. Many students want to copy things literally as then they know the grammar will be correct. I tell them I would rather see grammatical errors and mispellings than work that obviously is not theirs. Vocabulary can be an easy tip off for that. Overall our students are respectful and would not knowingly break copyright or plaglarism rules. So teaching these lessons may be the first they have heard of these rules as other countries may not hold these rules to the same degree as they are held here.

I was also very interested in the whole copyleft conversation the other evening at the MetroMini meeting. I had never heard of it before but looked it up in Wikipedia and know I too am educated on the subject.

Thing #11 Googling

I am totally amazed at how many things you can do with Google. I truly think it is the new Microsoft in the way Microsfot used to monopolize computer utility software. I heard the new that Microsoft is trying to purchase Yahoo and even the two of them combined would only be 40% of the traffic that Google has.

It was fun with the kids to try the street search to see our neighborhood as we virtually drove down the street. It is also cool to see a birds eye view of places with the ariel view. We set up our home mac to a personalized web page which is very handy to see the weather and current news topics. I checked out a book called Rule the Web: How to do Anythiing and Everything on the Internet, which tells more about the ever changing Google by Mark Frauenfelder. I found out he is one of the authors of Boing Boing, one of the most popular blogs on the web. Anyway, I highly recommend the book as it is easy to understand and explores several of the "things" we are exploring in this 23 + 1 endevour.

Thing #13 Easy ELM

I am loving this new password free ELM. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal to have no username and password for ELM but it is. Right in to searching without the hassle of signing in. I am using it myself much more and my students will be using it much more come second semester. We gave up trying to use it for class previously because of the problems students had getting in. It will be reintroduced first day of second semester and now I actually look forward to it.

Celebrating the MERGER (#4 again!)

Finally the deed is done and the Minneapolis and Hennepin County Library Systems have merged into one. This has been a wonderful event for our family as our neighborhood library reopened Thursday, January 3rd. We had gone an entire year with our favorite neighborhood destination cold and dark and what a sad situation that was. What with two children that had loved getting over there and two adults who adored our Roosevelt Library as well. We had been among the last to leave when it closed and we were the first family bustling in the door when it reopened. The entire day felt like a celebration of sorts. Our daughter was captured in this photo in the Star Tribune as she explored a new book.

PathFinders

I have been mulling over starting several Pathfinders @ Wellstone but this seemed so out of date. I was surprised to Joyce Valenza blogging about them too.
I had not thought about putting a pathfinder in a wiki but the more I read and thought about it the more sense it made. I think this will give me a reason to give the wiki thing a whirl.
Joyce's always intriguing blog is now posted on the left sidebar.

Say what?

Karen mentioned mashups at the beginning of our class this week and my mind went off on a tangent. I don't remember hearing this word before but it made me think of two incongruent things: mashed potatoes and car crashes. I looked it up on Wikipededia (after all our class was on wikis!) and found out all sorts of interesting information on mashups. The term can mean different things but the most interesting had to do with music. Taking two totally different genres of music and syncopating them. Maybe classical and rap. Fascination abounds with this type of creativity. Now I am interested in listening to some of these mashups or downloading them. What'll people think up next?

I am also interested in incorporating pix with my blog as I have seen Banlang do with her wonderful blog.