The first great find was discovered as I searched for some informative, yet fun activity for one of our 5th grade teachers.  She is putting together stations for the 100th day of school, and the whole theme uses pennies!  100th day isn’t just for Kindergarten!  She is very innovative and wanted one of the stations to be technology-based, cool!  So in my searching, I came across the US Mint’s Kids’ site!  What a treasure-trove!  Although I only had a chance to look at a few of the activities and links in their “clubhouse”, it is a very kid-friendly place!  The section I think we’ll use for the station is one of their interactive cartoons called, “Birth of a Coin” which walks you through exactly how the coins that end up in your couch are made!  Very neat!  I had no idea!  Since so many grade levels’ SCOS includes the teaching of money concepts, wouldn’t this be a great place to pique student interest!

The second great find came as I read Wesley Fryer’s post, “Singing, Not On the Test”.  Take just a minute to click on the NPR link and listen to the 2 minute song.  You will chuckle and shake your head in dismay at the same time!

Picture:  Fountain of Wishes

Was going to continue with my New Year’s Resolution to blog more, and answer the meme tag from Danita.  Having read the “big guys’” (guys to Yankees includes women!) answers to the very popular meme circulating the blogosphere, I tried not to curse when I got the tag!  But that will have to wait another day.

After meeting with Lee and Debra today and talking about projects we could develop for the iPods, I think Will Richardson’s post today is very timely!  He writes:

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that the convergence of all of this will fit in our pockets. It has to. The culture is demanding mobile computing, and it’s being driven by our kids. And I think we need to start looking at ways to leverage that ability.

Where to start? Experiment. A first step might be to go to Mogopop and put together a lesson that can upload to an iPod.  Not a phone, I know, but that ability will be here sooner than you think. It’s an easy way of getting your head around how it might play out.

So I visited Mogopop for a short time… may be worth looking into!  What do you think?

Today we attended the preconferences for LearnNC. The first 2 hours were spent exploring the LearnNC site, including some new applications they’ve added. There is a great new section for ESL curriculum, links, and assistance. I could spend hours playing with the thousands of great links they have collected. There are several new search strategies I was unaware of to find lesson plans and sites for specific grade levels and topics. Can’t wait to show the River!

Thanks to our gracious PTO, unitedstreaming, a wonderful tool for integrating video into your lessons, will be available to our staff for the coming year! As we think about using this service Al Doyle’s tips in his recent “No Fuss Video” article in techLearning provide some food for thought!

“1. Always preview the video prior to using in class. Download the video segments prior to screening if possible to obviate any possible bandwidth issues.
2. Allow students to ask questions during whole-class screenings; pause the video at any point to highlight certain aspects and check for comprehension.
3. Provide vocabulary lists, worksheets, and previewing and post-viewing activities (Discovery Education’s unitedstreaming provides blackline masters specifically for this purpose).
4. Keep in mind that a projector or interactive whiteboard can add value to VOD. Project directly on a chalkboard or a whiteboard. Pause the video and let students pick out salient details, label parts, or trace vectors of moving objects.”

Happy Streaming!

After sitting in on a training session at Tramway Elementary to watch the students first log in and learn about their Gaggle accounts, I can’t wait to take off with it at DR! Gaggle will not only allow the kids to have safe email accounts, they’ll have virtual lockers to save work into as they complete it between home and school! Even better, they will be able to blog! If you are not already a blogger, I encourage you to at least begin reading a few that are out there! You can Google educational blogs, or in a coming post I’ll link some of my favorites! In many blogs that I subscribe to, the recent buzz is about a virtual conference, the first of its kind that will take place this fall! The K12 Online Conference will take place in October! Bud the Teacher, one of the keynote speakers puts it this way:

“Announcing the first annual “K12 Online 2006″ convention for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 with the theme “Unleashing the Potential.” There will be four “conference strands”– two each week. Two presentations will be published in each strand each day, Monday – Friday, so four new presentations will be available each day over the course of the two-weeks. Each presentation will be given in podcast or screencast format and released via the conference blog (URL: TBA) and archived for posterity.”

I hope many of us will take advantage of checking it out! Especially since our funding for other conferences may be difficult to find this year. More to come…