"I Learn, You Learn, We Learn" Blog

Within the post before last I promised a photo of the Cinquain Quilt my class created during national literacy month. Students created a cinquain about a special person: family member, friend, etc.  We then cut them out and mounted them on decorative paper to create this paper quilt for this bulletin board.  I wish I saved some of the poetry they wrote about those people.

The bulletin board received many compliments. I did as well for incorporating literacy in my Family & Consumer Science classes.  My response? “Thank you. But what exactly do you think I teach in this class?”  I’m sure I don’t have to tell you their answers.

Did you know DEstreaming has many videos about poetry? There are 341 results when I search for “poetry” for grades 3-8.

I’m sure this is old news to some of you; however, whether you are a fan of Google or not, Picnik is a must for online photo editing.  I was reminded of this site by my daughter, who sent me this photo of her and our Howie.

Picnik  , recently acquired by Google, is a fast, fun, easy to use and powerful set of photo editing tools for editing, sharing and printing images using any Internet browser on any computer platform. Picnik is integrated with a wide variety of websites like Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, Flickr, and Photobucket. With Picnik, you can edit your photos wherever they are from wherever you are.

You don’t have to create an account to use Picnik  and it is FREE! Upload a picture and customize it in many, many, many, different ways. You’ll have loads of fun!

Hmmmmm…… I wonder who she was kissing before in this picture? An old boyfriend maybe?

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world. 

Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it!

Rule 2: The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life.. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs..

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Why not join one of these really cool  FREE webinars before the return to school?  It is guarenteed you will have some great new tools to start the new year with.

All sessions begin at 11 AM ET. Register Here. It’s free and easy.

Web 2.0 Week

8/24/09 Get Your Glog On! The DE streaming Builders and Glogster

8/25/09 The Thread that Ties it All Together: Discovery Education Content and Voicethread

8/26/09 Two Roundtrip Tickets to Anywhere in the World: Designing Virtual Field Trips with Discovery Education Media and Google Earth

8/27/09 Learning Through the Funnies: Mixing Discovery Education Content with Free Comic Tools

Enroll today.

A Symposium on the Use of Video Games as Teaching Tools
The Third Annual Symposium, Presented by 1st Playable Productions, WMHT & Hudson Valley Community College

Save the date in 2009! The third annual Games in Education Symposium, free to educators from Pre-K to college faculty in the Capital Region, is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, August 5-6th and will take place at the Hudson Valley Community College. Stay tuned for a full schedule of events and more details on the Symposium.

Interested in participating? If you are a local educator using video games in the classroom, we’d like to include you in a workshop or panel where you can share what you have learned with other local educators. Let us know what you would like to share!

Information on our past presenters is available through our Resources page. To join our email list and receive notifications of updates send us an email.

* Kevin Dorsey, A STAR Discovery Educator from Schenectady City Schools, won a terrific door prize at this symposium last year!

As we move towards the end of a year and the beginning of a new, it’s time to reflect and evaluate activities and priorities of the past and for the future. For this reason, I am going to be taking a hiatus from my blog.   

I am still honored to be part of the DEN and will continue doing whatever I can to support NY, and especially

Schenectady, in using Discovery and all they offer.  

Thanks to all who viewed, read, used and shared a resource, tip or technique; from the I Learn, You Learn, We Learn blog.  

Warmest wishes to everyone for a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season.

 Web Wednesday is a feature of the online “Big Deal Book”. This Wednesday’s theme is Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy. Check out the book for more online deals. You’ll find everything from grant opportunities to free and inexpensive finds

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Stock Talk
Who was Dow Jones? What stock has been in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) since the DJIA started? What are the only Nasdaq stocks in the DJIA? See how well your students do in answering these and other stock-market questions in this online quiz. Then see below for ideas that will help you integrate financial literacy into your curriculum.

Dollars and Sense
The Stock Market Game™ program offers a vast library of learning materials correlated to national voluntary and state educational standards in Math, Business Education, Economics, English/Language Arts, Technology, Social Studies and Family, and Consumer Sciences.

The program teaches and reinforces critical-thinking and decision-making skills, cooperation and communication, independent research, and saving and investing. In playing The Stock Market Game, students use real Internet research and news updates, making the simulation an even better mirror of the real marketplace. Game dates, fees and competitions vary by local program.

Bull or Bear?
InvestWrite®, an innovative national writing competition produced by The Stock Market Game™ program, adds a critical-thinking component to help reinforce concepts learned in the classroom.

Every student currently registered in The Stock Market Game program with a valid team login ID and password is eligible. Students participate by writing essays in their grade division: Elementary (4–5), Middle School (6–8), High School (9–12).

Every InvestWrite assignment introduces or relates to investment principles linked to The Stock Market Game program. Each assignment ties to various lessons throughout the curriculum.

Both teachers and students will have a chance to win gift certificates, laptop computers and trips to New York City or Disney World in Orlando. To participate in the InvestWrite competition, you’ll need to complete the online pre-registration form. In addition, by December 5, 2008, you’ll need to submit a short and simple online entry form for each student’s entry.

 * Web Wednesday is a feature of The Big Deal Book – Amazing Resources for 21st Century Educators

 In the Teacher Tools section of  DEstreaming you can find themes to fit just about any topic.  Each theme includes video segments, lesson plans, discussion guides, related resources and student activities for each grade level.* Before clicking on the link below, open a new window and log in to your DEstreaming account.

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This weeks theme is: Grammar

Are you inspired by clear communication and well-crafted writing? Understanding grammar can put you at the top of your game in writing and speaking. Explore the fundamentals of grammar to become more successful at communicating everyday.

Life, denied access to blog, sickness…. you name it, can sometimes get in the way of the posts I’d like to keep up with. So here’s one that’s better late than not at all.

 Web Wednesday is a feature of the online “Big Deal Book”. This Wednesday’s theme is Civic Literacy

Check out the book for more online deals. You’ll find everything from grant opportunities to free and inexpensive finds

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Voting Smarts!
Invite your students to test their knowledge of voting laws with this mini-quiz from the American Bar Association (ABA). The quiz is scored online and includes an explanation of answers. The explanation pages also include links to more information and resources on the ABA site.

See below for additional ideas that will help you integrate civic literacy into your classroom activities.
 

A Voice for Change
These Web pages, provided by the ABA, offer a special look at how America’s diverse peoples come together to participate in society through an institution synonymous with democracy: voting.

This year’s Online Conversation, designed especially for students and teachers, is divided into four sections, each looking at a different aspect of voting and the way it affects our participation in our government and our communities.

The four sections, which you can reach through the links below, explore voting and Youth Citizenship, Voter Registration, Representation in our system and finally Campaign Reform. In each section, you’ll find a short article looking at history, law and voting today. You’ll also find an interactive section where students can vote on an issue related to the topic. You’ll find the results of related surveys and research data, and links to related articles and Web sites.

After you familiarize yourself with the topic, visit the Activities section, where you can choose among several Web-based activities for each topic, designed both for classroom and individual use.

 * Web Wednesday is a feature of The Big Deal Book – Amazing Resources for 21st Century Educators

A fish diagram? Must be another fun thing I missed when I was in school. Check this out, it looks like some fun for your students.

ClassTools.net is a simple-to-use Flash-based game creator that allows you to use templates to make your own addicting online games. The beauty here is that the hard part is done for you. You don’t need to know a thing about Flash to make these games or play them. All you have to know is the content you want to place in the template. It really couldn’t get much simpler. Different games are catered to different subject areas, but you’ll be able to find something for any subject.

Along with the games, you will find templates for charts and Venn diagrams, for example, and each one is terribly easy to use. Once you are happy with your creation, you can then save and embed them on your own blog, website or online course. You’ll find an example here. Some aspects of the site are glitchy, but then again, the whole Internet is a little glitchy sometimes. There are a bundle of games to choose from, though, so you are bound to find something that works. – JEREMY S.GRIFFIN

Get a promotional flyer about ClassTools Here

Whew…..  a little over a week since the last day of the 07-08 school year and I’m wondering where the time went already.  While many of my colleagues and “network buddies” were in San Antonio enjoying the whirlwind of excitement of NECC, I was up north enjoying a terrific few days just sitting lazily by the beach with no Internet access.  Previously, this would have really bothered me; however, for some reason the last few days without the feeling of having to check my email every hour or read my hundreds of feeds from my Google reader was enjoyable and restful. I didn’t even open a book (which for me is unheard of).

Now that I’m back in the grips of reality, I have some catching up to do: blog posts, book club posts, professional development proposals, summer workshop agendas and preparation, reading the feeds, catching up with those who went to NECC and getting reading for the DEN Summer Institute in Maryland (can’t wait for this one).   With everything that needs to get done, I should’ve planned to use the time more efficiently while doing nothing during my few days up north. 

On second thought, no way!  I think everyone needs some time, even if it is just a little bit, to do nothing and enjoy something other than our day-to-day work.

I love these lines from a poem by Cool Cat Teacher -

Balance, perspective, focus, and time offline
will become successful habits of the overachieving mind.

Reject the invisible hand that pushes you to stress
think what you want and how time should be spent best.

Here’s to a few days like this for all of you!

Web Wednesday is a feature of the online “Big Deal Book”. This Wednesday’s theme is Global  Awareness

Check out the book for more online deals. You’ll find everything from grant opportunities to free and inexpensive finds

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Around the World
Use the interactive world map on this site to quickly move around the world and select regions of interest. You will then be able to drill down to a closer view and access satellite images and individual country maps and guides. Then see below for ideas that will help you increase your students’ global awareness. 

Meet Your Global Neighbor
Global Awareness is an educational program sponsored by the American Institute for Foreign Study, designed to promote multicultural understanding and appreciation in elementary and middle school classrooms. The program’s Kids Culture Corner is a fun site to learn about the world. You will find interesting facts, music, folktales, games and activities, recipes, history, holidays, famous people and languages from around the world.

Where in the World …?
TeachersFirst’s Globetracker’s Mission is an engaging way for students in grades 2–6 to learn geography, map skills and world cultures through an episodic story. Each week, a new episode, in the format of a blog post, appears on the Globetracker’s Mission site. The “blog” is written by fictional teenagers Geo and Meri as they travel the seven continents of the world on a secret “mission” for an unnamed government agency. They seek clues and travel under the supervision of their Uncle Globetracker, writing the “blog” as part of their requirements for missing high school work. Classes who follow the mission learn standards-based terms and concepts of world geography as they respond to Geo and Meri’s think-aloud questions, using maps, images and links that Geo and Meri provide. Concepts include landforms, map skills, cultures, major landmarks, continents, oceans, rivers—and more.

Note: Both current and previous weeks’ episodes from this mission will be online through the end of June 2008.  This mission will go into a hidden archive at the end of June. Learn more about how to access hidden archives during summer 2008.

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Missed last week. Thank goodness for the archives.May 21 -Information, Communication and Technology Literacy

Bits and Bytes
See how well your students know the terminology used today for the computer and Internet. Invite them to try this online quiz. Then see below for more ideas on how to integrate technology skills into your curriculum.

Web Wise
Designed for beginners yet precise in its technical content, Building a School Web Site engages children in designing their own Web sites—step by step—with the help of Wanda Wigglebits. It’s a learn-as-you-go, hands-on project that teachers and students can have a great time doing together.

Team Tech
Students in grades 6–9 are at the heart of a new technology literacy certification program from Generation YES Corp. Beginning in June, TechYES Science will prepare small groups of student peer mentors to assist all science students as they complete technology-infused science projects. TechYES Science will also assess whether students’ projects meet the ISTE NET•S standards

Here’s a shout out to teachers everywhere including my terrific colleagues in Schenectady City Schools and those fantastic DEN Stars!  Enjoy the week.

Get a jump start on your classroom lesson plans for next week. Include
DEstreaming video content and make history come alive for your students.   Visit
the Calendar within the Teacher Center of DEstreaming for more videos of history during thisweek.*

*Note – Before clicking on the links below, sign in to yourDEstreaming account

Science – May 12 - 1874:Ironing table patented

Math -May11 - 1951:Computer core memory patented

Social Studies -May 15 -1602:Discovery of Cape Cod

Art & Humanities – May 16-  1929:First Academy Awards Ceremony

Language Arts – May 17-    1890:First Weekly Comic Paper Published in London

Health & Guidance – May16 - 1988:Nicotine Declared Addictive

Famous People – May 11-  1811:Chang and Eng, first Siamese twins

CommemorativeEvents :  May 11- Mother’s Day  May17 -Armed Forces Day , May 17 -Memorial Day , Mental Health Awareness Month

The image above is that of Vincent VanGogh’s Sunflowers. On May 15 1990, another of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous paintings, Portrait of Doctor Gachet , was sold at Christie’s auction house for $82.5 million.

Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh. Corbis. 2006.unitedstreaming. 5 May 2008
<http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/>

 Web Wednesday is a feature of the online Big Deal Book. 

This Wednesday’s theme is Health Literacy.

Check out the book for more online deals. You’ll find everything from grant opportunities to free and inexpensive finds.

From A to Zzzz
Sleep is a basic necessity of students’ lives, as important to their health as nutrition and exercise. When students sleep well, they wake up feeling refreshed, alert and ready to face daily challenges. When they don’t, every part of their lives can suffer, including academic achievement, relationships, health, safety and general wellbeing. How much do your students know about sleep and alertness? Try these quizzes from the National Sleep Foundation. Then see below for ideas on how to make your students fully aware of this basic health necessity.

Sleep Daze
At the National Sleep Foundation’s Sleep for Kids Web site, children learn about what happens while they sleep, play fun games and keep track of their own sleep. In the Parents and Teachers section, you’ll find great information to help children learn about the benefits of sleep.

Eyes Wide Shut
According to the results of the National Sleep Foundation’s Sleep in America poll, most youths get less sleep during a 24-hour period than recommended by sleep experts. Find out about teenagers’ sleep habits, sleep disorders and more in the Teens and Sleep section of the foundation’s Web site. Be sure to check out the “Sleep-Smart Tips for Teens.”

For those of you who subscribe to Discovery Education Health, you know what a great resource it is for health and safety. If you dont…. let you administrators know about it!!!