Monthly Archives: December 2007

Edublog Awards: the winners 2007

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Youth Radio did not win in this year’s Edublog Awards, and that is perfectly fine, since there were just so many wonderful sites and resources as part of the process. If you haven’t scrolled through these sites, you probably should. And then add them to your RSS feeders. It’s the wonder of collective knowledge.

The winners this year are:

Best educational use of a virtual world
Suffern middle school in Second Life

Best educational use of a social networking service
Classroom 2.0, Steve Hargadon

Best educational wiki
Welker’s Wikinomics, Jason Welker

Best educational use of video / visual
RBG Street Scholars Think Tank Multi-Media E-Zine, Marc Imhotep Cray

Best educational use of audio
SMARTBoard Lessons Podcast

Best elearning / corporate education blog
eLearning Technology, Tony Karrer

Best educational tech support blog
El tinglado, Josa Cuerva Moreno

Best librarian / library blog
A Library By Any Other Name, Vaughn Branom

Best teacher blog
The tempered radical, Bill Ferriter

Most influential blog post
Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher? – The Fischbowl, Karl Fisch

Best resource sharing blog
TipLine – Gates’ Computer Tips, Jim Gates

Best new blog
dy/dan, Dan Myer

Best group blog
Techlearning blog

Best individual blog
ScienceRoll, Berci Meskó, Hungary

Peace (in sharing),
Kevin

Just One More Book: My Review

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Thanks to a tip and inspiration from Susan, I submitted a podcast review of a Chris Van Allsburg picture book to a site called Just One More Book that you just have to add into your RSS feeds if you enjoy the world of picture books.

Justonebook

Susan had done a review of a book called The Goats in the Rug and her efforts showed me the way to the site, and I figured that I should share this book, too.

The picture book that I chose is called The Mysteries of Harris Burdick and it is a great resource for writing prompts with my sixth graders. You will have to listen to my podcast review to understand why I like it so much as a source for reading and writing.

Peace (in pictures and podcasts),
Kevin

PS — Oh, here is my podcast review from Just One More Book.

How NOT to Powerpoint

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I came across a version of this video in my Bloglines and was laughing my socks off, as it most humorously shows us all of the ways that Powerpoint is completely misused.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Rp8dugDbf4w" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Now, in the comment section of YouTube where I got this video, was this interesting comment:

oh my god. teachers in my school make EVERY SINGLE MISTAKE. in fact, every ONE of them is capable of committing ALL those mistakes in ONE single presentation! and people wonder why the students are comatose in class…

Peace (in bullets and slides),

Kevin

The Return of Day in a Sentence (for now)

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It’s back home again for the Day in a Sentence feature. Day in Sentence Icon Bonnie did an outstanding job as guest host and I have two more volunteers on board for the near future: Larry F. and Matthew N.

As always, we want to get a look inside your week or day and we encourage you to do this with brevity, wit, humor and passion. In other words, boil it all down into a sentence, my friends.

Please use the comment feature on this post to submit your sentences, and if you have a blog, leave the address for me to reference when I collate and post them all together as a community experience on Sunday.

Here is my sentence:

My classroom is a zone of complete and absolute “puppet mania” right now as my sixth graders are writing original plays, creating strange puppet characters and shifting from the role of creator to performer for younger students at our school who will soon become our audience.

How about you? If you want to podcast your sentence, you can provide us with the link or you can email me the file and I will host it for you. My email is dogtrax(at)gmail(dot)com. I would love to hear your voices.

Peace (in puppets),
Kevin

Student Voices — Adventure Stories

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(Note from Kevin: This has been sitting in my bin for a few week)

My sixth graders recently completed a short adventure story project and we created these podcasts in which they choose a tiny bit of their story to share with the class and the world (through our class website — allowing parents to listen in, too).

story pic

(A view inside a diorama of Ali’s adventure story)

The young writers have been hard at work developing adventure short stories, using the concept of Plot Development, character development and the use of action to move the story along. Today, before they turned in their stories for a grade, they chose small sections of their stories to read aloud for this podcast.

Listen in as they provide a snapshot into their stories:

Peace (in young voices),
Kevin

Teachers Teaching Teachers

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I had the honor again of joining folks on the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast (now a podcast) that focused on the work of the National Writing Project and came on the heels of the annual meeting in New York City. The focus of the webcast was on collaboration, but the theme soon became: how do we engage teachers in our writing projects with technology. The TTT show is run by Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim and takes place every Wednesday night at EdTechTalk.

Here are the guests who joined the conversation on this particular night:

  • Cynthia Calvert, Alcorn Writing Project
  • Jason Shiroff, Denver Writing Project
  • Lynne Culp, UCLA Writing Project
  • Kevin Hodgson, Western Massachusetts Writing Project
  • Peter Kittle, Northern California Writing Project
  • Christina Cantrill, NWP Program Associate in Technology

And here is the podcast.

Peace (in collaboration),
Kevin

Go Elf Yourself: viral marketing

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Even though I know this is nothing more than a marketing ploy to get the words “OfficeMax” situated in my brain this holiday season, I could not resist using something called ElfYourself, which adds any headshot you feed it to an elf body and gets those bodies jiggying to some music. This is clearly a viral campaign by the company and, you know, it works. I am seeing references to ElfYourself all over my Bloglines. Our family was laughing and giggling as we watched our dog, Bella, and cat, Coltrane, dancing away.

I wanted to try to catch it as a video file but had little luck. I did use my new screencapture program — Camstasia (which is now a free download) — and it is really jerky. But I did make this photo as a screenshot from the site, and now it is our desktop photo. (Notice I removed the OfficeMax from the shot).

Peace (in Elfworld),

Kevin

Bonnie’s Blog is a Blast

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(I couldn’t resist some alliteration in the title here — sorry)

Please head over to Bonnie’s Blog to get the scoop on this week’s ever-expanding, ever-interesting Day in a Sentence feature. There are some amazing insights in this week’s crop of words and Bonnie certainly did an outstanding job with her introductions (better than I have ever done).

See you next week, when the feature returns here to my site and then heads off to someone else’s blog (Larry kindly offered, so I will contact him)  as we pass this “gift” around to each other.

Peace (in partnership),
Kevin

Claymation Magic/Understanding Disabilities

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Some of you know I adore claymation — as a viewer, as a creator and as a teacher — and I just stumbled on a PR campaign by Aardman Animation (of Wallace and Gromit fame) to bring light to the difficulties facing disabled people in the UK.

The campaign — known as Creature Discomforts — uses animation to get the point across that people may be disabled, but they are people, first, and they need support, encouragement, love and acceptance (most of all).

At their website, they say:

Leonard Cheshire Disability campaigns to change the way people think about, and respond to, disability. Creature Discomforts is one way we hope to do that. It’s a series of animations based on the experiences of real disabled people. They’re lovely characters and this is where you can find out all about them.

Here is one of their spots:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/Z4YsF-SsEQo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

But just as neat and important are these “behind the scenes” look at the creation of the advertising campaign. I had trouble embedding them because, I think, they are part of UK.Youtube, so here are the links:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/qnzQckQhfTE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

and

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/5cCkhGMISkg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Peace (in understanding and acceptance),
Kevin