Chris Lehmann of Beacon School in New York talks about their annual poetry festival, I Sing America, and how it is just one of the things that makes Beacon a special community. This sounds like a wonderful event. It would be fun to try something like this next year at Lewis.
if:book: hyperlinks in printifBook discusses David Foster Wallace's cover story about talk radio in the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The print version utilizes an interesting approach to footnotes and endnotes by including them along side the text. A screengrab of what this looks like in the print version is available on the if:Book web site. The online version at The Atlantic utilizes traditional hyperlinks. The full article is only available to subscribers, but if you follow the comments in the ifBook post you might find a link to the whole article in PDF...
Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!! Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!
Well, guess we'll see if this turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing soon enough... Am wondering how they have hooked it into Yahoo! 360....
Liz Lane Lawley is teaching a graduate course entitled Current Themes in Information Technology. It’s a distance learning course and she is using a course weblog to organize and present content and is having her students create weblogs where they post their assignments. She has subscribed to their RSS feeds so can easily see when students "turn in" assignments. Office hours are via instant messenger and class discussions take place on IRC. By using "off the shelf" tools such as weblogs, IM and IRC, she has constructed a course space at a fraction of what it would cost to use such tools as WebCT or Blackboard.
360 was not designed to be YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service). The goal is not to amass as many "friends" as possible, unlike Friendster, Orkut, and others. It's about making it easier to share stuff with people who really are you friends--tne ones you already talk to, email, IM, etc.
Jeremy also has links to several articles about the new service and has some thoughts on ETech... Yahoo! 360 is currently by invitation only, but is expected to go live on March 29...
Yahoo! 360° - What is Yahoo! 360°? Yahoo is soon to release Yahoo! 360, their photo sharing and blogging tool...
This past week I had the opportunity to travel to San Diego to attend and present at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. Tom Hoffman and I presented a short talk entitled, From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool. Chris Jablonski of ZD-Net has a nice summary of our talk. Tom did a great job introducing SchoolTool, the open source student information system, to the audience and pointed them to the just released SchoolBell, the stand alone calendar component of SchoolTool. Over spring break, I plan to install SchoolBell to run a web based calendar for scheduling resources (computer lab, gym, cafeteria...) at Lewis Elementary.
While I won't be able to run SchoolTool as our student information system, I am very happy to see it being developed and supported. I am looking forward to the day when I can point people to a school in the developing world that is keeping track of student information using SchoolTool, and point out how they are doing so using a tool that is customizable and extendable and is free... Take that A.L.L. ...
"LiveJournaler rinku has some simple but effective advice on how to get your space in order. Make a big pile of stuff that isn't where it belongs, and then tackle it.From that pile, everything that you don't need and will likely never use in the next 4 years or so, throw or give away. This includes valuable things, sentimental objects, cobwebs, and so forth. The bits about putting things where they contextually make sense - pen near paper, a clock where it's visible - may seem obvious, but the huge difference it makes when you grab a pad and need a pen is not.the best way to organize your room [rinku's LiveJournal]
"
(Via Lifehacker.)
Ok, I'll give this one a try...
Sy Wexler, an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose educational movies - from "Squeak the Squirrel" to "Teeth Are for Life" - flickered for decades in darkened classrooms around the world, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 88 and lived in Hollywood.
As a member of the Edison Elementary School AV club, I bet I showed a few of Mr. Wexler's films while in elementary school... The AV club was responsible for showing movies in classrooms. Teachers would request a film and then one of the AV Club students would be sent with the film and projector to set up and show the film. It was a great way to get out of class...
Libraries are an essential service, too | csmonitor.comWilliam Ecenbarger writes in The Christian Science Monitor about libraries and their essential place in our society.
But in fact, libraries are essential. Reading is still the most basic survival skill in today's information-driven society. Moreover, the gap between rich and poor is widening, and the libraries level the playing field.
Portland is very fortunate to have the Multnomah County Library as a resource for our families and students. They offer a wide variety of online and face to face services including book groups, story times, access to periodicals and encyclopedias, and homework help.
At Lewis Elementary we have shared with our families resources such as Jon Udell’s Library Lookup Tool. The Lookup Tool is a bookmarklet written in JavaScript code that extracts the ISBN number from the URL on a bookseller's page, then goes to a library catalog (in our case, the Multnomah County Library) and searches by ISBN. If the library owns the book, the record pops up. It allows our staff to point parents to our local library to find copies of popular books that are being shared in class.
QOOP Web-based remote print and publish. This looks pretty interesting. I saw a link to this on Caterina Fake's Flickr blog. Remote publishing of any digital file. Am thinking this might be interesting for school. We could create books and photo albums associated with school events and activities, and then make them available to familes for purchase. For an example take a look at the Flickr blog...
Wired 13.03: The Book Stops Here
Jimmy Wales wanted to build a free encyclopedia on the Internet. So he raised an army of amateurs and created the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future called Wikipedia...Now Wales has brought forth a third model - call it One for All. Instead of one really smart guy, Wikipedia draws on thousands of fairly smart guys and gals - because in the metamathematics of encyclopedias, 500 Kvarans equals one Pliny the Elder...
This month's Wired has a very good article about Wikipedia and some of the people who write the articles found there. I found the story of Einar Kvaran to be interesting and instructive about the authors and their motivations for writing for Wikipedia. According the article Kvaran is currently unemployed, but spends about six hours a day reading and writing about public art and sculpture and publishes his work in Wikipedia...
Flickrfox is an extension for Firefox (version 1.0) that lets you browse your Flickr photostreams in a Firefox sidebar. You can choose streams to display including everyone's, friends and family, contacts and groups... Keep up with new photos while you work on the web...
(Via Lifehacker.)
I'm playing around with RSS feeds from Flickr. Just about anything you have in Flickr can generate an RSS feed... Comments, tagged images... it is a pretty powerful feature... The link below leads to a display of the images I have tagged in Flickr with the term kids. I also use the tool to display my del.icio.us links on the right sidebar of this page and utilize it quite a bit on the Lewis Elementary site. To display the RSS feed I am using a tool developed by Alan Levine called Feed to JavaScript. It is web based tool that allows you to paste in the url of an RSS feed and generate a JavaScript that can then be added to your web page or to a weblog post, and the items in that RSS feed will automatically flow into your page everytime it is loaded. Kind of an automatic update. Alan allows folks to utilize the tool from his server at Maricopa Community College in Arizona, or you can grab the code and run it from your own server.
NPR : Wikipedia's Growth Comes with ConcernsThis morning National Public Radio's Weekend Edition had a piece on Wikipedia, its growth over the past four years, and the usual pros and cons concerning accuracy and editorial control. I have a longer post about this over at eSchoolNews....
iPod Shuffle Hint From My Daughter Karina
Originally uploaded by timlauer.
My daughter makes a pitch for an iPod Shuffle...
Gates Crew
Originally uploaded by timlauer.
The Gates Project
A lot being written and said about the Christo, Jeanne Claude installation in Central Park. From the New York Times today...
Even at first blush, it was clear that "The Gates" is a work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century. It remains on view for just 16 days. Consider yourself forewarned. Time is fleeting.
The Times also has a special section with all of its coverage. One of the parents from my school is in New York working on the project. She was part of an installation team.
A sweeping narrative from the transatlantic slave trade to the Western migration, the colonization movement, the Great Migration, and the contemporary immigration of Caribbeans, Haitians, and sub-Saharan Africans. Told in historical texts, rare visual materials, and contemporary photo-journalism.
This site from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture provides access to 8,300 images, 17,000 pages of texts and over 60 maps. In Motion focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds. Includes a section of educational materials for teachers and students.
A good example of an institution making their collections available to others through the web.
#2
Originally uploaded by lydiamaria.
My oldest daughter is a graphic design student at Seattle University. She uses Flickr to post some of her work. Her is a draft of a submission for one of her classes...
