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.