Listen Current provides free audio clips from public radio broadcasts (like NPR's) for use in the classroom. The "current events" clips may be played without signing up. With a free subscription, you get access to a Library of Common Core Lesson Plans; and activities such as a Language Identification Worksheet with certain clips. The Language Identification Worksheet struck me as possibly being quite valuable for ESL students: Students are directed to "Listen closely and check off each phrase as you hear it," then given a written set of phrases to recognize/identify as spoken: "Try to imagine a world without war, conflict, grief, or memory," "He began to lose pieces of his memory", "And I had to tell him about her death," etc. Other notes:
* Lesson plans / audio clips are available for Science, Social Science, and ELA.
* Premium features like "interactive transcripts" of the public radio stories [what are those?] are available by school/district subscription.
* Site founder and current CEO is Monica Brady-Myerov, longtime public radio reporter.

Our nifty, shiny Merit Badge pins arrived on campus over the break! A reminder how to get your own : ).

A new page in the Lab Portal summarizes the requirements for our slick new Technology Merit Badge pins. Look for the list, and directions for completing the 4 Bold Deeds, here.

Who knew? Right out of the box, SchoolLoop itself provides most of Diigo's functionality, WITHOUT requiring you to create student logins. Read more here.

To get an idea of what this allows, log into SchoolLoop and then click to see this amazing page created by Carolyn Holler's students.

Now post a response using the discussion mechanism in this dummy example to try it out. Click "Egypt Challenges Per. 2", then Continue, then Discuss. Note the fancy Microsoft Word-style text editor used to enter your thoughts.

This discussion mechanism is included in every SchoolLoop Notes/Blog Section Element. You can add one of these Notes Element to your Professional Page, as I did here. Or, you can create a subordinate page and add the Notes Element to it. [Note: If you try to add two Notes elements to the same page to create two separate discussions, it won't work. You will just get two panes displaying the same discussion. You must create a new mini-Site, whose Discussion cache will be shared by every page you add to it. Note I did this to create the dummy example linked above.]

The really remarkable thing, though, is that a Discussion element is built into every assignment that you post to your Gradebook. A link to each active assignment appears in the lefthand column of a student's home page while the assignment is open (you may need to check the start and end dates you posted). The student simply clicks the assignment link to see your directions for the assignment. Beneath your directions is the Post button.

Small links displayed near the assignment link also let students submit electronic documents directly to your Gradebook. The submitted document can originate from either from the student's Locker (recommended) or from their Desktop. When you view the scores for a single assignment, you'll see a link to the student's document to the right of their score box in your Gradebook.

Do SchoolLoop Discussions eliminate the need for an external site like Diigo? In a majority of classroom situations, yes. However, Diigo's "notify" feature and profile photographs make a discussion being published for review by the general public more accessible.

http://www.polleverywhere.com/

Live audience participation with instant onscreen voting for your classes. The basic account on this website has a tough-to-resist selling point: It's free.

Audiences of up to 40 students navitage to your personal voting page (even better--just click a link on your Lab Page). The students see whatever poll question you choose to display, then respond. Their answers display in real time, or all at once: your choice.

About our Mac Cart: We've checked every MacBook on the Cart and can assure you this app now works on them all. Note that students can also respond to polls via cellphone if you prefer. Well worth checking out.

Phi Delta Kappa is a US professional organization for educators headquartered in Bloomington, Indiana. This issue, titled "Literacy Instruction in a Brave New World", contains a number of technology-oriented articles of potential interest to our staff. Ms. Cruz has a copy. Topics of interest include:

* Literacy Instruction in the brave new world of technology (Michael McKenna)
* Maryanne Wolf: Balance technlogy and deep reading to create biliterate children (Joan Richardson)
* Fact or fiction? Libraries can thrive in the Digital Age (Christopher Harris)
* Can computers make the grade in writing exams? (Samina Hadi-Tabassum)
* Creating Digital Authors (Zoch/Langston-DeMott/Adams-Budde)
* E-text and e-books are changing the literacy landscape (Bridget Dalton)
* Wondering + online inquiry = learning (Sekeres/Cairo/Castek/Guzniczak)
* Tapping technology's potential to motivate readers (Kristen Conradi)

"The number of students who are not engaged with or motivated by school learning grows at every grade level, reaching epidemic proportions in high school."

That quote seized my attention as I picked up this publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. I thought, this is exactly backwards: the number of students engaged in school should INCREASE at every grade level. But it does not.

Ms. Kajder's concern is to engage students and teachers in learning new ways of using technology, together. She aims to "see" who students "really are"--to discove their existing digital skills, to learn how they use them, and alongside them to evaluate diverse websites and online apps as tools to accomplish their group aims.

Fascinating case studies and anecdotes illustrate her points. Consider, for example, her description of the (real) student "Jassar". According to Kajder:

"He is a student in fifth period, tenth-grade English. At the start of the semester, his name appeared on the initial class roster coated in yellow highlighter and annotated with words he carried like baggage from the previous term-non-reader, below-level, at-risk. He sits in the right rear corner of the classroom, behind more vocal and active students who provide a bit of a shield from the teacher's questions and eyes. Assessments tell us that he is reading on a sixth-grade level (but it has been a year since he's been willing to fill out a Scantron sheet), and he struggles to write by hand. By all of the measures that we use in school, Jassar is underperforming and lacking in literacy skills.

"And outside of school? Jassar is active in service learning, organizing and leading projects for middle and high school youth through his church. To anchor this work, he has developed an annotated Google Map of the comunity, placing a "pin" and a written description noting the site, work, and participants in a specific project. So, cursoring over the community center will reveal a description of a project completed in September in which three high school students built a new walkway to support handicapped access to the building, and cursoring over the high school will reveal the ongoing hours for the student-run food bank. Some of the annotations include images of students and community members working together at the corresponding site. The site is open for community access and is "publicized" by flyers Jassar has posted in high-traffic areas (like the teen rec center, the community library, and the local post office) and distributed for peers to hand out within the town. To share the link with digital youth, he has created a Facebook group and a page on MySpace, and is beginning to develop a Ning to support collaboration and community among those who have worked on local community projects. Fueled by his interests in community service, Jassar is now working to build/design a group for American teens that accomplishes the same goals/outcomes as kiva.org, a website which helps to support the work of international entrepreneurs who are working to lift themselves out of poverty.

"... Jassar is vibrantly literate in ways that are purposeful and important, and in ways that have a place in a classroom that values bringing together his digital literacy skills; his passion for doing work that 'matters' outside of school walls; his need to interact with expert, authentic audiences; and the diverse texts, skills, and experiences that make up our English curricula. This book is about the work of imagining and building the English classroom where Jassar (and his peers) might come alive as engaged readers and writers...."

Pretty neat stuff, if you ask this teacher. Hamilton has a copy of this book in our library; and it is also available from Amazon for about $30.