Opening Day at Lewis

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Below is what I shared with my staff on our staff bulletin blog tonight... It was a very good day today.

I wanted to thank all of you for a great first day of school. The sight of so many smiling children and parents is something I always look forward to as we start the new school year. I had an opportunity to spend time in every classroom and I saw happy and hopeful children. I saw teachers and support staff focused on engaging students and welcoming them to the new school year. The best part of my work is to be able to walk into your classrooms and talk to students about the work they are doing and why it is important.

I had the opportunity to view parts of President Obama's address to students in two of our classrooms. It is a message that should resonate with all of us. Work hard, do your best, respect your teachers, you have a responsibility to succeed, never give up... It was delivered with passion and an understanding that the work that we do can shape the arc of a student's life. It is important and valuable work that we have the honor of doing and I felt that the President hit the mark in helping our students understand how important education can be in shaping their lives. If you would like to view his address, please follow this link: President Obama's Address to Students.

Finally, as I traveled around the school today, I heard many comments from students that make me proud to work with such a dedicated group of professionals. Below are just a few...

"Best day of school ever."

"I really like my teacher."

"You know, she really is a very good teacher."

"I like being at Lewis."

"She is nice."

"This is cool."

"How's it going? ""It's going really well.""

"Can I recycle?"

"Can I play Candy Land?"

"He helps me."

"I like it here."

We work in a very special place. You all make it so. Thank you for such a great first day of school.

Google Street View Trike on Springwater Corridor

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On Friday I was riding back to school on the Springwater Corridor and rode past the Google Street View Tricycle. The Springwater Corridor is a bike and pedestrian trail in Southeast Portland that is part of the partially completed 40 Mile Loop. The Street View Tricycle is used by Google to capture images for Google Street View in areas where cars are not allowed. Wonder how long before the images of the Corridor are up?

TRIKESIDE.jpg

Photo by Renê Fraga

Audio Postcards with Posterous

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I've been playing around a bit with Posterous and its ability to post audio recordings from my iPhone along with several images to create audio postcards. The example linked below is of a recent trip up to Mt. Tabor park for an evening concert. It is a pretty easy process.( a good description of this can be found on John Johnston's Posterous blog...) Basically I take some images, then using the iPhone's audio recorder app, I record a message and then select the email option. I paste a few images from the Camera Roll app and add any text and then email the message to my posterous account and I have a post with images, text and an audio file. I have created a separate Posterous blog for these audio postcards and I can route the RSS feed from this blog to my timlauer.org account and embed the audio postcard feed in the sidebar. Posterous is really an interesting tool for streaming content to lots of different places...

Concert on Mt. Tabor. If this was a SEC event I might be in trouble.

 

Soul City playing at Mt. Tabor Park

 

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via audiopostcards.posterous.com

 

Posted via web from Tim's posterous

picPosterous

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John Johnston has a post up about picPosterous, an iPhone camera app that allows you to post a series of photos to a posterous post. Nice for adding images to a gallery over the course of an event or through the course of a day. John points out a few limitations and from reading the developers blog it looks as if those will be addressed. One feature I would like to see is the ability to add images to various galleries rather than just the last one created. I could see using this to document classroom visits and samples of student work. Would be nice to have the ability to choose which of my recent galleries to post an image to. For example I might create a gallery for specific classrooms and as I take images I can post them in the appropriate classroom gallery.

picPosterous

Sunday 23 August 2009 at 10:18 pm.

picPosterous is a photo and video publishing app for the iPhone.

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At first glance I could not see the advantage of using this rather than the iPhone's mail application, and neither could TechCrunch but a tweet or two from Sachin, one of posterous's founders both put me on the right track and gave further evidence that the posterous guys never sleep.

via johnjohnston.info

 

Posted via web from Tim's posterous