A Teacher's Life

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...