Thanks to some year-long mentoring by Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim, I am now fully on board with students having their own blogs. I logged off Wednesday night’s Teachers Teaching Teachers Skypecast with some concrete ideas for providing students with the scaffolding to incorporate and share research in their blog posts. Paul has set up [...]

Just finished a wonderful week at the Area 3 Writing Project’s summer tech institute Telling Stories in a Digital Age. We started the week with a look at digital story telling as a genre, using Movie Maker 2 as the video editing tool. Throughout the week, we introduced blogging using Edublogs. Unlike the Blogging 101 [...]

I’m sitting in an A3WP tech workshop brainstorming with our summer institute teachers about what makes a PowerPoint presentation ineffective, boring, confusing and/or painful to sit through. Here are some of our thoughts: Too much writing on a slide Horrid color combinations Background sounds Spelling and grammar errors Too many objects or words flying in [...]

Because I am still very much a learner in understanding all the tools available to teachers in Edublogs.org, one blog I’ve added to my reader is Mike Temple’s Edublogs Tutorials. For anyone seeking advanced sessions on Edublogs, Mike’s site will most likely meet that need. So I loved this week’s post with an embedded video [...]

To pass the time on my flights to and from NECC, I grabbed – and dusted off – a few magazines from my nightstand. The first article to catch my eye was from the April/May 2007 edition of George Luca’s edutopia: Overcoming Underachievement – How a simple writing exercise dismantled negative racial preconceptions. I’ve since [...]

Time to reflect on some favorites from NECC 2007 Favorite toy: Flip video camera – Priced at 75$ at Costco for the model that offers up to 30 minutes of video, this pocket-sized camera has a popout USB plug in. So no more hunting for cables. And at that price, I think teachers will feel [...]