See today’s Boolean Squared for the many ways that Boolean and Urth keep busy (unfortunately, it is not doing their science homework).
http://blog.masslive.com/nie/boolean_squared/
Kevin
See today’s Boolean Squared for the many ways that Boolean and Urth keep busy (unfortunately, it is not doing their science homework).
http://blog.masslive.com/nie/boolean_squared/
Kevin
The annual Edublog Awards (known as The Eddies) are underway again this year. No, it is not part of the Edublogs blogging network (although James is graciously offering up some of his Campus blogging suites as prizes). It’s a way to recognize some of the outstanding blogging that is going on. What I like is that when the actual voting takes place, you can follow the links to the nominees and discover all new worlds of blogs out there.
I struggled with nominations, but here are a few:
That’s all I got for now.
(I hope you will nominate some of your favorite blogs, too. Go here for more information).
Peace (in resources),
Kevin
My friend, George, is up to something interesting again (last year, it was the inspiring Many Voices for Darfur project) and it reminds me that what goes around, comes around. Last year, George asked about integrating stop-motion animation in the classroom as my class was engaged in claymation projects. Now, he has a group of kids calling themselves The Longfellow Ten who are creating and producing stopmotion films around literary terms. And he asked if my students might be interested in joining his students, and possibly others, in building up a site of short stop-motion films on certain themes (George, can we do Math in the spring?).
I looked at my schedule, cleared out a few things and today, I began working with all four of my classes on stopmotion movies. I just let them play today and they had a blast, using the freeware (StopMotion Animator) and webcams and a few even made it into Moviemaker to start messing with titles. Tomorrow, we move on to the real lesson. They will be working in small groups to develop a short movie on a literary theme that is part of our curriculum:
Antagonist
Protagonist
Foreshadowing
Dialogue
Setting
First Person Point of View
Third Person Point of View
Plot
Characterization
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Here is a picture of them at “work” today.
And here is a little movie that I made with one of the classes to show how it is done.
More to come in the future …
Peace (frame by frame),
Kevin
I’ve been thinking in syllables this week (maybe some residual sickness?) and so it seemed natural to return Days in a Sentence to a former version of itself, known as Day in a Haiku. I invite you to boil down your week or a day in your week into a haiku (traditional structure: 5-7-5 or non-traditional) and share it out with us here at Day in a Sentence.
Use the comment link on this post to submit your words. I will keep them in a moderation bin until this weekend, when I will publish them all.
Here is mine (as podcast):
Macs for podcasting
then, PCs for stopmotion;
Maps, too. We’re busy.
Peace (in verse),
Kevin
My webcomic, Boolean Squared, has been added to a new site called WebComicCollage, which is a visual indez of various webcomics. I’m pretty excited to see him there in the mix.
Remember: Boolean Squared gets posted to the newspaper site every Monday and Thursday now (see today’s comic) and then are also archived over at my Home for Boolean Squared. The RSS Feed for Boolean Squared is right here for you, if you want it.
Peace (in funnies),
Kevin
I like to pose some tech-related questions to my students each year, just to get a sense of where they are at with their own use of technology. I usually tack on this question: What will a classroom of the future (say, 50 years from now) look like? The answers are always amusing and interesting. This year, a big theme — floating chairs and desks.
Check out some of the student responses:
I also took all of the answers and threw them into Wordle:
It’s nice to know that teacher will still be needed, although a few of them have converted us into robots.
I wonder what your kids think if you pose the same question.
Peace (in a robotic voice),
Kevin
I knew this was possible (and thanks, Sheryl, for reminding me) but I had not done it, but … wow — moving my Hero’s Journey from Google Maps into Google Earth was very cool. And so simple: download the .kml file from my Google map and open it right up in Google Earth. So simple, and yet, being able to move across the globe like that, and to zoom down into the terrain … pretty amazing.
Want to give it a try? Here is the kml file from my Hero’s Journey sample. I am hoping you can just open it up and it will launch your Google Earth application (if you have it and if you don’t or need the Earth update — as I did — it will walk you through the process).
And thanks, too, to Sheryl for reminding me of the LitTrips site, in which teachers map out stories with kml files right on Google Earth. I found the one for the Odyssey interesting.
Peace (and safe journeys),
Kevin
So, I had this idea … (don’t these projects all begin like that?). We have just finished reading The Lightning Thief, which is a fantastic book set in Modern Day against the landscape of Greek Mythology that has as its main character a boy (Percy Jackson) who is considered dyslexic and ADHD, but who finds out he is really a half-god and must avert World War III by returning the stolen Lightning Bolt of Zeus. The kids eat this book up and many were borrowing Greek Mythology books from the library. I had parents saying their kids were reading, on their own, more than I had assigned — for the first time that they could ever remember. Honest.
So, too bad we had to end it, right?
Next up: the graphic novel version of The Odyssey. I convinced my team to invest some of our shared resource funds into a set of the novel, which is going to be a perfect companion to The Lightning Thief, and should allow them to see how the travails of Odysseus (and his hubris) are alive and well in Percy Jackson. Plus, it has cool monsters and stuff. And it allows me to teach a bit about image and text and the dynamics of a graphic novel (this is another first for us).
So, I was trying to think about a project after we read The Odyssey and it occurred to me that a great project would be for them to create their very own Heroic Journey Home. It would be a creative journey, but how best to show it? Why not use an online mapping program, I realized, that would allow them to learn more about the technology and create something interesting. I thought about CommunityWalk — too many advertisements. I searched around for some others. Interesting, but nothing outstanding. And I kept returning to Google Maps and so, that is where I stand right now (but still searching).
And as it turns out, in writing class, we have been doing an entire descriptive writing project around monster, so there are illustrations of almost 90 monsters that they can draw upon to “encounter” on their way back home. Are you with me so far?
If so, can you give me some feedback on this sample Heroic Journey that I created?
View Larger Map
Thanks and peace (with as little hubris as I can muster),
Kevin
I was interested to see what would happen if you Wordled the two political speeches: Obama’s acceptance and McCain’s concession. So, what the heck, I did it.
This is Obama:
I like how change and hope and world and new are out front (wordle takes text and recasts it based on frequency). I guess you can’t give a political speech when you win the presidency without saying America over and over again, right? But notice some of the smaller words and how they seem to capture details of ideas and policy. Interesting.
Here is McCain’s (which I had to edit the various “boos” and chanting from the text version that I was using):
Country is certainly front and center, and notice how differences is pretty prevalent, too. And, to give McCain credit, he noted the achievement of Obama in his speech. And of course, he mentioned Obama by name more than a few times (as opposed to Obama, whose reference to McCain barely registered in Wordle).
McCain should be commended for this line: “…he (Obama) managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.”
What do you think?
Kevin