Egypt Research Project

I am excited to report that Jeanne and I are working on a collaborative project! Nothing better than having a great Media Specialist that I can turn to!

I have always done a research project on Ancient Egypt because it is high interest for the students and to get them researching right away at the beginning of the year. This year I have decided to change the project and "ramp it up" quite a bit to align better with National History Day.

Jeanne and I both know the challenges students have faced in the past with History Day, so we were able to come up with some areas that kids need to focus on: citing sources, note taking, searching databases. Rather than focus on all parts of the research process, we decided to focus on these areas.

I used a lot of the worksheets available from the Research Project Calculator to create an informative packet for the kids. the first half of the packet will be yellow and will be all about the research process. The second part of the packet will be blue and it will deal with how to present the information. I think having this color-coded for 8th graders will work well.

I also plan on using the Wed Search Strategies in Plain English on Common Craft.

Additionally, I made a very quick powerpoint comparing a google search to a database. I am providing the students with the analogy that if you need to drive in a nail you use a hammer (database) not the ENTIRE hardware store (google). Like Jeanne said, we will still have kids wandering up and down every aisle in the hardware store, but if just a few kids catch on to the idea our job will be that much easier.

I am excited about all the planning that is going into this project and look forward to seeing the results over the next couple of weeks.

Video

On Monday we took our eigth grade teams to Camp Streefland for a team building day and of course I brought my camera. I started out taking several pictures of the kids, but eventually the kids got my camera and went crazy. I debated about what to do with the pictures, but remembered wonderful Travis talking about animoto last year and decided to go that route.

Then I embeded the video onto my school website so all of my kids can see it. What a great way to showcase the pictures.

Click here to see it.

wordle.net

While playing around with various sites, I came across wordle.net

It is a fun tool which created "word clouds". The original ones I saw were a speech by McCain and another by Obama. The size of the words is determined by the number of times the word appears in the text. I made one for my Metronet blog and was happy to see that "students" was one of the largest words in my "word cloud". I think this tool would create some very cool posters for a classroom. It would also be cool to compare political speeches.

Click to see my metronet word cloud
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Thing 2: Blogging and Rss

Yowza! There is so much out there in the land of blogging/RSS. I am so excited each time I log onto igoogle and see that I have some new blog posts to read in my google reader. Yes, I am a dork. I admit it!

During last year's MILI experience I was good about reading the blogs of people involved with the program. Now I am realizing how much more there is out there. I just subscribed to some sites dedicated to incorporating technology in the classroom. "TechTalk4Teachers" and "FreeTech4Teachers" had some great ideas. While reading through these sites, I discovered xtimeline.com which looks like a great tool for history teachers. I will certainly be spending some time there. I also came across realworldmath.org. I immediately sent this link to the math teachers that I work with.

The four youtube and google videos posted on our mili wiki reminded me that we need to meet students where they are at. I was especially struck by the young man who said that reading a blog and scrolling on a screen was much easier than turning the pages of the book. As someone who grew up loving to read, it is important for me to realize that the format of reading has changed. I did a very basic history day blog last year and these videos caused me to think about moving to the next level. I like blogging in this way because it is a meaningful integration of technology.

I tried to do a blog search for some good blogs about teaching in a middle school. I didn't have much luck with that. I also tried to look for a world history blog with no success. So, I decided to look for some recipe blogs. I was much more successful with that. YUMMY!

Google Chrome

As you may have already read on Travis's blog, I recently discovered Google Chrome. I actually need to thank MPR for telling me all about it. This new web browser is faster than Explorer or Firefox. According to the report, Chrome is designed for all the elements of a web page that exist today: audio, video, text, etc...The older browsers are really good at text-based web pages but don't deal well with some of the newer items that web pages are adding. Chrome has a lot of great features. I think one of the best is that if one web page freezes, others that are open in other tabs will remain in working order. This allows you to close whatever isn't working and still keep doing other things. I am still more comfortable with Explorer, but Chrome deserves some further investigation.

More thing 1: getting better at goanimate.com

Here is my second attempt. I shared this with my teacher friends...

Thing 1: Information literacy and web 2.0

As I sit around and count the last few hours of summer and mentally prepare for the 2008-2009 school year, I decided to distract myself with some MILI work.

I really enjoyed the "truth:can you handle it" article. The part about students getting impatient while they research especially resonated with me. If teachers plagarize-proof their assignments then they are asking students to do research that will take some time. Students live in a world where information is just a click away. but as the article pointed out we need to help students understand what to do with that information and how to form knowledge.

The article also made me feel better about asking kids to use book resources and limiting their use of websites while researching. I feel like understanding a variety of sources is part of the research process. I hope that when kids leave my classroom they understand a wide variety of sources and the benefits and burdens of each source. I believe this will help them discover the truth about research.

Another part of this "thing" was to look at some of the web 2.0 tools. I was overwhelmed by all the items listed on http://www.go2web20.net/ I got a big kick out of the description for getmooh.com: "Get me out of here....
Getmooh is an automated call back service. It is designed to help you escape a variety of situations by calling you automatically on your phone at a pre-specified time and playing you a recording which will either instruct you on what to say to elude your tormentor(s), or which will simply give a convincing sense of you being on an important call." Perhaps this is a tool for those difficult parent meetings...

I spent some time playing around with goanimate.com I thought it would be a lot of fun. I must admit that I got frustrated wih some of the features. It took me about 15-20 minutes just to do what you see here. I am sure students would LOVE doing this. I thought it might be fun to have my group of 17 advisees create a short animation about school for conferences. I think it would be a cool thing for them to show their parents. "Traditional" conferences are so obsolete with all the tools available to parents to look up grades online. So, coming up with creative ways for kids to express themselves at conferences is a MUST!