Today 23 volunteers braved the cold and come out to work at Lewis Elementary as part of our King Holiday Day of Service. We got quite a bit accomplished including pruning our apple trees, and the cleaning out of several flower beds. Along with students, staff and parents, our work party also included 8 Americorp volunteers who pitched in to help with the projects. It was a great event. Happy King Day.
Currently Portland Public Schools utilizes polystyrene foam trays in its school lunch program. Lewis Elementary School staff, parents and students have voiced concern about the environmental impact of polystyrene and have been looking to go back to washable trays. Through the help of our PTA, we have purchased washable trays and we are involved in a pilot program to use washable trays instead of polystyrene for some of our lunches. This program relies on parent and community volunteers coming in during the lunch hour and washing the trays. We currently use these trays on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, thus reducing the amount of polystyrene we put into the waste stream. We are looking for additional parent volunteers who are willing wash trays and commit their time a day a week between 11:40 and 1:00 pm to help with this effort.
If you can help, or would like more information please contact the Lewis Elementary School Americorp Volunteer, Julia Hamlin by phone at 503 9126 6360 or by email at lewislearninggardens@gmail.com
Lewis parent helping with our lunch tray program...
My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven:
Yesterday the Library of Congress announced that they are releasing close to 3000 photos from their collection to a new Flickr page. The images are such that there are no known copyright restrictions. This is just a drop in the bucket when you consider that they have close to 14 million photographs and other visual materials in their collection, but this is pretty exciting non the less. They are also allowing users to add notes and comments to the images. The image map belows show the associated data that is posted for each image.
Hal MacLean has a short review of the Asus EeePC, the ultra light web enabled lynux laptop. I have one on order, according to UPS, it should arrive today, and I am looking to order about 20 if they live up to expectations.
Pingie is a web tool that allows you to sign up to receive SMS (text messages) messages whenever a particular RSS feed is updated. Might be useful to monitor sites within my district that are updated on a less frequent basis. An interesting way to keep up with your information flow. Regular SMS charges apply. Read more on the Pingie Blog...
