One of the  many benefits of attending the annual CUE conference is the year’s subscription to the OnCue Journal.  My Spring 2010 copy just arrived today and, as usual, contains a few gems. My favorites are the links from CLRN’s Kelly Day in her Global Connections article: African Voices – from the Smithsonian Institution National [...]

How do we bring administrators on board with 21st century possibilities for teaching and learning? This question has been on my mind since Wednesday, when a colleague shared with me that her principal came to her classroom while she was embarking on a movie making project with her class.  In front of the students, he [...]

For the Week of Feb 14th: Who Pooped? – Found this beautifully done K-adult site from the Minnesota Zoo on Larry Ferlazzo’s site (Note to self: budget time into my day to start visiting all of Larry’s Best of links.) And, yes, the site is very accessible to English Language Learners. Word It Like Warren [...]

I choose my battles carefully. But I’m definitely jumping in on this one: On February 1, the Obama administration released its 2011 budget proposal. In this proposed budget, funding for the NWP is consolidated with five other literacy programs under a new states-based competitive grants program that provides money for improving literacy. The NWP as [...]

This morning’s Sacramento Bee has a feature story on Bob Fletcher. Who is Bob Fletcher? The Bee’s headline sums it up: “When Florin growers were interned in WWII, he stepped in.” Too often for our students, history happens in a textbook, with the correct answers at the end of the chapter. Stories like Bob Fletcher’s [...]

I promise this will be my last rant on the widely popular Accelerated Reader program, but I feel the need to share an essay posted last summer to the New York Times.   Author Susan Straight’s “Reading by Numbers” gives a parent’s perspective on the negative impact this “reading management” software that reduces reading to a [...]

The subtitle for yesterday’s Academic Literacy Summit was Writing to Think and Learn in All Content Areas. Definitely Giving Voice to Students was also an common thread running through all sessions – starting with my EETT team presentation Integrating Digital Literacies into Upper Elementary Classrooms . Our lunch break was amazing. Students from the Sacramento [...]

I’ve been to NECC several times, but as a first-timer to EduCon, if I had to choose between the two conferences, I’d lean towards EduCon for the following: Reason #1: Sessions are more like conversations than presentations. Every session I attended truly was “an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas – from the very practical [...]