A Teacher's Life

A Teacher's Life FYI, I've moved this blog to TypePad. It's much easier to customize and manage blogs with this service, although it is not free. So if you're one of the two people who look at this site, make a note of this change! Lucy

Ping-o-Matic! I've been looking a bit more closely at blogging and all that it entails. I'm especially interested in life beyond Blogger and how people create and maintain well designed and interactive weblogs. This site has come to my attention as one way of increasing web traffic for a blog, so I'm going to give it a try.

Apple Matters | Handicapping the 12th Oh I am excited about tomorrow! I wonder what the big reveal will be. This article sums up the rampant rumors. I'm voting that it will be an iPod Video.

The Friday 5 Hi Subscribers, Here's a quick list of sites that I think are worth checking out. Again, I learned about most of these during the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute last week. The Friday 5 is going to continue in its present form, but I'm also going to be sending out the list via Yahoo! Groups. The reason for this is that people can subscribe to the RSS feed in Yahoo Groups. If you have no idea what I am talking about, don't worry because I will be addressing the subject of RSS feeds and news aggregators in a future issue! If you are interested in joining the Yahoo Group for the Friday 5, please visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/friday5/. Have a great week, Lucy Gray lgray@ucls.uchicago.edu The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools ----- 1) Domino Artwork http://www.dominoartwork.com/educators.html A teacher at my school just had her students render the Mona Lisa in dominoes, so I decided to check out the web site of the artist who inspired their proje...

TagCloud - View Cloud I found out about this free service while looking at someone's blog from NECC. You add rss subscriptions, and a list is generated of keywords based on what you've subscribed to. Pretty cool!

Hi Everyone, Long time, no Friday 5! I think I'm going to sporadically send out Friday 5 lists during the summer as I'm just too busy these days. Here are a few sites that I've picked up from that National Educational Computing Conference which concluded today in Philadelphia. I didn't see as many sessions as I normally have in past years, so I don't have a slew of sites to pass on. However, the buzz at NECC seemed to revolve around podcasts and blogging, so many of this week's list revolve around those topics. In light of how podcasting, blogging and RSS feeds are taking off, I am now going to try and add the Friday 5 to my blog and hopefully I'll even attempt a podcast this summer. Stay tuned! ------ Friday 5 NECC 2005 eSchool News Conference Information Center NECC 2005 Weblog http://www.eschoolnews.com/cic/necc/blog/ I wrote a few entries for this blog, but they are not posted yet. Make sure you browse this blog, especially if you were unable to attend t...

If you do a Google search for the woman's web portfolio mentioned in this article, it pops right up. I thought her site had a nice design to it, and it looks like it's done by a professional company. There are dozens of ways to do something similar, probably without spending a ton on a professional service. Anyway, I don't think the content of this article involves rocket science. Most people in my field have already realized that having a "web prescence" is important professionally. I think the next issue regarding personal information online is going to be how to remove yourself from certain situations that may involve details being online. Heck, it seems everyone is googling each other for more info! How much info is enough? And is should everyone be privy to all this information? Web Sites, Blogs Can Boost Your Career - Yahoo! News

Interactive 'Clickers' Changing Classrooms - Yahoo! News Here's something worth checking out! Anyone out there use a clicker?

BRAVO > Project Greenlight Until today, I had never watched this show. It's totally fascinating and a great look behind the scenes of making a movie. Given all the factors involved in producing a film, it's amazing that movies get made at all. I never paid much attention to the intricacies of moviemaking until I started playing with iMovie. It's changed how I view all media... commericials, music videos, motion pictures...what have you. At any rate, I think any teacher interested in working with multimedia should watch this show. Besides learning about the movie business, Project Greenlight is giving me insight into collaboration and leadership as a whole. It's very interesting to watch the director particularly because he's not a very assertive person, yet has definite ideas about how things are done. And, I'm not sure if he's quite clear on the concept of going along to get along. The interpersonal skills involved in a huge project whether it...

I edited this Blog's template by pasting in the HTML code that will allow readers to join my Friday 5 listserv. The Friday 5 is a list of five thematically related web sites sent out to teachers on a weekly basis. Look on the left sidebar of this blog if you're interested in joining. I'm annoyed right now because somehow my personal blog has disappeared from my Blogger "dashboard". I don't recall deleting it, and I can't imagine that I'd do this by mistake. I wrote customer service about this... at least this professional blog hasn't poofed!

The Chronicle: 6/6/2003: Scholars Who Blog I found this article on bloggin in higher ed, and it briefly mentions my alma mater, Beloit College!

Welcome to unitedstreaming™ I'm in a workshop right now on this product. I really hope that my school will purchase a subscription to this service that provides full length videos, clips, and images to schools. This footage can be downloaded or streamed to computers.The searching capabilities are excellent; one can find videos according to grade level, subject matter, and individual state standards. The quality of the videos looks good and I like how they have ASCD professional development videos available. You can also make quizzes at this site and there is a calendar online which correlates videos to important dates. Plenty of support is offered for incorporating video clips into other progams such as Inspiration, PowerPoint, and Timeliner. I can see uses for this with my Lab Schools kids as well as with my NLU students. The workshop is being held at the Michigan Avenue Apple Store in their fourth floor classroom. All I can say is, WOW! I'll post pictures later.

MarcoPolo: Showing Teachers How to Use Rich Internet Content in Their Classrooms We've been talking about MarcoPolo in class. Here's a link to an article on the George Lucas Educational Foundation web site that explains the MarcoPolo program.

In my NLU class on Tuesday, we discussed how the teaching of the LOGO programming language has come to a standstill. Interestingly enough, this post appeared recently in a listserv I belong to, and I thought I'd share it here. Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 07:22:15 -0400 From: EDTECH Editor-Jones Subject: Re: Logo status? From: Paul Left Has the power of the Internet, digital cameras and multimedia software met this goal in other ways, such that Logo is dated, out-of-fashion? Has the standards movement made the constructivist approach to using it too difficult to carry out in school settings? I taught with Logo in the early 80s, mostly on Apple II but also on C64. I loved it (both the turtle graphics and its list processing features) and regret its demise. It suited my teaching philosophy very nicely. I suspect it's not popular because: * not all learners are suited or ready for the demands of problem-solving with Logo * very few teachers are suited or...

USATODAY.com - Coffee table can now showcase custom photo book Here's an interesting article for those of you who were intrigued by the iPhoto books on our field trip. I heard about this link from the ED TECH listserv, which I will discuss in class in the next week. Enjoy!

I met my NLU students at Apple's Michigan Avenue store tonight for class. I designed a scavenger hunt for my students and Scott Murphy did a presentation on the iLife suite of software in the theatre. When I arrived at the store, several students were already there. And, they had figured out how to do video chats already! I had told them on Tuesday that creating a video chat would be one of the requirements of the scavenger hunt. So I was impressed that they had already done this by the time I arrived on the scene. Their enthusiasm got me pumped for the field trip in general! At the beginning of the theatre presentation, Scott asked our group what their impressions were of Apple. And, the usual comments were discussed... Apple products are more expensive.... not pervasive in the business community... etc. By the end of the presentation, I think the group fully understood about what makes Apple stuff so unique. Scott was a trooper and spend way more time than I expected lead...

iChat AV & Science Found this while browsing the aforementioned site. Check out this neat way of using iChat AV to teach preservice teachers.

iSightEd --- the eyes and ears of Education I found this site while browsing Apple's education pages. Looks like a great place to find other teachers who want to learn more about video and audio chats.

Please reply to this entry with some thoughts on Brian Schultz's presentation last week. Did anything particularly impress you? What do you think about the ways he integrates technology? Did you discover any ideas that you might bring into your own classroom?

Scholastic Pic from NECC Originally uploaded by elemenous . Here I am extreme skateboarding. Just a new little hobby I took up over the summer! :)