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set up your own twitter type network for your classes. Safe

Featured Post Scholastic's The First Thanksgiving What it is: Scholastic has amazing resources all year long but the interactive on The First Thanksgiving is topnotch!  Students learn about how the Pilgrims reached America, and what daily life was before the First Thanksgiving.  Students can take a tour of the Mayflower, take the virtual journey to America, compare and contrast modern life with when the Pilgrims lived (housing, clothes, food, chores, school, games), and the Thanksgiving feast.  There is a great slideshow and play a webquest feature where kids can learn more about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag and the famous harvest feast.  The site includes audio for every page and activity.  This is great for younger students. How to integrate Scholastic's The First Thanksgiving into the classroom: The First Thanksgiving is a collection of great activities for students to learn about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims.  Students can use this site independently as young as first grade because of the audio features on The First Thanksgiving.  The site can be used as a center activity that a few students can explore together, independently in the computer lab setting, or as a whole class with a projector or interactive whiteboard.  The webquest at the end of the activity checks for student understanding with a quiz.  Increase students participation further with some The First Thanksgiving bonus features and extras.  Print out a Thanksgiving Readers theater, door signs, a fact hunt, a vocabulary quiz, and some letters from historical figures.  There are also research and historical fiction journals that students can continue learning with.  These range from a Plymoth Colony research starter to Our America: Colonial period. Tips: Check out Scholastic's Teaching resources for The First Thanksgiving as well as the literature connections that are available. Leave a comment and share how you are using The First Thanksgiving  in your classroom. Read More

It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version. [Could reverse the order too]

Interactive Science experiments and challenges for your class. The latest is how to make a mud battery.

Scholastic and Turtle Pond Interactive invite you and your class on a virtual field trip to an aquarium in Florida! Students will be introduced to an extraordinary and inspiring bottlenose dolphin named Winter, who was just three months old when she lost her tail after it became caught and mangled in a crab trap.

a small autonomous underwater vehicle to cross the atlantic from NJ to spain. Classes can follow along. Right now you can send a message to be carried by the robot

The following open courseware collections include classes, entire courses, and lessons that are sure to please the musician in you. Select from college courses from some of the top-ranked universities, educational open courseware collections, music schools, and many more.

I began reading Diane Cordell's blog. She shared a fabulous beginning-of-the-year activity to get her students thinking about class rules using images from Flickr as visual prompts. She wrote about the process, shared the links and the finalized SlideShare. The activity got her kids thinking both divergently and convergently about how a classroom can work as a community. I needed to do that, too.

New Diigo Pioneer badge

If you want more "bling" for your blog -- Diigo has a new program to recognize educational pioneers using Diigo. Since the beginning, Maggie Tsai has listened to educators (not just me) in amazing ways and this is great. If you have a classroom diigo group, then log into your teacher console and snag your "diigo educational pioneer" badge - I'm going to get mine!! We use diigo groups for all of my classes and we have tag dictionaries based upon the major topics we cover.

With class ending this week, my students want to once more go into Lively to express how they feel about this great service. They love it, although we are moving ahead to explore other options (which we'll announce in January) -- so, they want to have a virtual funeral for Lively which will happen this Thursday. Just check their blog and read this post from the students about what they are planning. Again, this is a student driven project - they are currently reflecting on this process and will be sharing their thoughts about whether the protest was worth it and what they have learned. Stay tuned, the Digiteen Dream Team is a great student blog that will continue!

An amazing teacher who uses Google Calendar to manage her classes in the library. This is such a helpful tool to use. I want to share what many are doing. Take a look!

Educators are using Google calendars to share their schedule via wiki.

Susan Silverman knows how to do elementary projects -- Her fall project is the Online Autumn Revival and includes Kindergarten, 1st grade and 2nd grade classes. This is a great one.

Jennifer Eubank's Class Blog. She is in Taylor County (just spent some time there) and is really on fire! She used a google form this week. There are so many great ways to use these tools and NO ONE has the monopoly. (No, not me either!) It is so important to keep looking at what teachers are doing and share what we think works and doesn't. I expect great things out of Jennifer!

Teacher blog sample.

Fifteen year old programmer, Kasra Kyanzadeh, from Canada, emailed me to tell her about this website. This is another one to review. I hope that you'll share if you've used this site and what you think. With so many easy options, we should all be able to find something that suits our needs (and/or our filter.) This one costs $20 CAD a year but you can have a 90 day free trial.

Another site for building a class website. They offer a 90 day free trial but it costs $20 CAD a year.

Joyful learning can flourish in school-if you give joy a chance. JOY 1: Find the Pleasure in Learning;JOY 2: Give Students Choice;JOY 3: Let Students Create Things;JOY 4: Show Off Student Work JOY 5: Take Time to Tinker;JOY 6: Make School Spaces Inviting;JOY 7: Get Outside;JOY 8: Read Good Books;JOY 9: Offer More Gym and Arts Classes;JOY 10: Transform Assessment;JOY 11: Have Some Fun Together

Free workshop in Chicago on Web 2.0 in education - November 8and 9th.

Free Web 2.0 workshop in Chicago on Friday November 7 and Saturday november 8 from 8 am - 4 pm. Steve Hargadon is working with this and he always does an excellent job. Best of all , it is FREE! A good 20 or so people are already signed up - http://wiki.classroom20.com/Attending+Chicago+2008

Website to promote community service - curriculum and awards program.

This seems to be a great organization with curriculum, information and a structure to plan community service projects within your class. Students can earn points and an awards program exists as well. I've gotten permission for our Special Olympics Bocce Ball event to be an ad hoc event to support this cause. We have over 50 students who serve as officials for Special Olympics Bocce Ball players - it has become a very large Special Olympics Event in the State of Georgia. Join in!

Student version of Kindle is confirmed for students. Oh so cool. My students really like the idea of a Kindle and I'm wanting to get a hold of one. They will HAVE to make it easier to add all blogs to the information on a Kindle -- I'll want their Google calendar and my class blog to download automatically. It is too hard to add info to the Kindle now unless you publish a book, and then it is easier. Need an ebook of some kind.

Amazon Kindle for Students.

There's much anger circulating around the blogosphere about the comments of Michael Reiss, Director of Education at the Royal Society about how to deal with creationism and ID in school science classes. In fact, the whole thing could stand as an example of how on some issues (of which this is one) people only want to hear an unequivocal assertion of a party line and get unreasonably annoyed (and purport not to understand what they understand perfectly well) when someone says something nuanced or pragmatic.