Stories for the Interactive White Board

I couldn't miss this one and pass it along to you all.

This site is an exciting compilation of stories that are just great to be projected on a big scree for the little ones or even for our adult classes.

Take a look at it and enjoy! Let us know if it was useful for you and if you planned something for it.

http://plattsburgh.neric.org/oak/smartboard/stories.htm

Week 1 - Getting Started

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathangill/2357002711

Bud the Teacher wrote a thought-provoking blog post with an open letter to the teachers available at http://budtheteacher.com/blog/2008/08/16/an-open-letter-to-teachers/

After reading his blog post, reflect and share with your colleagues two aspects of your teaching that you want to change or give a different approach.

Then, reply to at least one of your peers by adding a comment or asking a question.

Make this space an open area for your thoughts about the beginning of this journey.

Click on "Comments".

Telling a Story, Developing Multiliteracies

I just got this video via Twitter (a microblogging site) from a dear friend, Ana Maria Menezes, a mineirinha, who has a bag full of tricks to share.




The story is simple, but then, I just realized that it is a wonderful springboard to explore language. Imagine a group activity, or even a collaborative project with sister classes in which they have the same claymation and learners are responsible for creating the stories to go with the animation. They could even record the stories.

How motivating would that be? Is it the kind of experiential learning we could add more frequently to our lesson plans? Do you have any other ideas to go with this video? Or do you have any other video that could be used for the same idea?

Originally posted on Thursday, October 2, 2008

Google Reader - RSS

As we are talking this week about RSS and how to add all our favorite blogs, sites, wikis to our Google Reader, I've aggregated all participants blogs in one folder in Google Reader and then I made the folder public by going to the "settings", "Folders and tags". After making it public, I clicked on "add a blogroll to your site", I copied the crazy code there and just copied to this post so that you have an idea of it. The ideal is to add it to your class sidebar if you have students with individual blogs, or if you want to call the attention of your blog audience to certain blogs you enjoy reading.





Here's how the blogroll will look like:





You can also add a "clip", which is like the latest updates on the group blogs so that it's easier for your audience and you to visualize the latest posts on a blog, for example:




And how about sharing a clip of your favorite shared items?




All of this is made through the "Settings" part of your google reader. If you have any questions or comments about this, just ask here!

Edublog Talk - part 2

As I explore the new blogging endeavors of the Webtools4Educators participants, I feel the same excitement I had when I started blogging. It´s a semantic world where we reveal ourselves, we learn more about ourselves and our preferences, tendencies. It´s a faithful portraits of the individuals in their many facets.

One main challenge of blogging is certainly how to keep the conversations going, how to encourage your audience to reply, to comment, to think. What strategies would you use to encourage this dialogic approach?

Well, here´s my comment to all of you and one way to encourage the flow of conversations. You´ve been actively interacting, so instead of keeping the conversation in the comment area, I bring it again to the front page with another post. Any more brilliant ideas? I´d love to finish the week with a pout-pourri of effective ways of edublog talk.

Please, be a little patient for the video to load.

WebTools4Educators Search Fun

Amazing to see the group web presence in just a few weeks, to play around with Quintura search and visualize how far we've gone together just by mousing over the nodes.

Happy Teacher's Day

The text I read is available on Bud Hunt's blog at http://budtheteacher.com/blog/2008/08/16/an-open-letter-to-teachers/

View this Scrapbook page full size.