The National Wildlife Federation has some great information on creating a schoolyard habitat. This is the kind of thing you could plan during post-planning to give time for the summer and to have them ready for the fall. There is also a way to certify your school yard habitat. We have two gardens at our school and outdoor classrooms and the students learn so much. I highly recommend considering this at your school. This can be done with all ages.
Can you design a school to promote healthy eating? There are things every cafeteria can do (read to the end.) This is a big problem and something we need to address. Every school should have a fruit basket near the checkout. It is a no brainer, but do we?
"Just walk into the cafeteria and you can see this is no ordinary elementary school.
"One of the most striking differences is the openness of the eating space," said pediatrician Dr. Matthew Trowbridge, who also consulted on the project.
Students can look into the area where the food is prepared, and they can look outside to a planned school garden, where vegetables will soon be planted."
Photo =gallery from the science fair at the White House. Science teachers should peruse these. I wish every student had to do a science fair project and we'd elevate project based activities to the "status" of doing well on an SAT or other test. I think these require a lot more higher order thinking and problem solving.
"President Obama hosts the White House Science Fair to celebrate the student winners of a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions from across the country. He met students in the East Garden of the White House, and they explained their science projects and experiments to him.
Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post"
Website to teach you about how the food got to you! This is a really neat website for elementary teachers who discuss food production. There is a resource for teachers as well. As a farm girl, it is great to see a site that discusses the importance of farming. This is so important for kids to understand.
We garden at our school and it is great!
"Imagine lying on the floor of a Tudor hall and gazing up at the expressions of art all around you, listening to the sound of melodies Henry VIII would have heard, or breathing in the scent of seasonal herbs that have graced a kitchen garden for three hundred years.
These wonderful experiences would be a treat to the senses for any of us, but for our students who are working towards or at Entry Level 1, multi-sensory learning is an essential part of engaging with the world around them."
Facebook's group for schools has just been announced. You don't have to be friends with your students to add them to a class group on Facebook. This is only for highered but is a move to become a more formal learning network. Facebook may evolve from a social network to a social and educational network. This is a big deal and colleges should take a look at this.
A UK based site where schools can request a 'Grow Your Own Potatoes' kit and information and ideas about how to bring this into the curriculum.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Cross+Curricular
Large corporations then profit from this interaction by collecting and selling this data. Social participation is the oil of the digital economy. Today, communication is a mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.
The revenues of today's social aggregators are promising but their speculative value exceeds billions of dollars. Capital manages to expropriate value from the commons; labor goes beyond the factory, all of society is put to work. Every aspect of life drives the digital economy: sexual desire, boredom, friendship — and all becomes fodder for speculative profit.
Free Software and similar practices have provided important alternatives to and critiques of traditional modes of intellectual property to date but user agency is not just a question of content ownership. Users should demand data portability, the right to pack up and leave the walled gardens of institutionalized labor à la Facebook or StudiVZ. We should ask which rights users have beyond their roles as consumers and citizens.
How much should Google pay them to tag an image? Such payment could easily become more of an insult than a remuneration. Currently, there are few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy.
The Internet as Playground and Factory poses a series of questions about the conundrums surrounding labor (and often the labor of love) in relation to our digital present: