Manic Monday Mishmosh

The title says it all.

***I’d like to give credit where credit is due - my post yesterday, Here’s Your Evidence - Part 1, was completely inspired by the following:

A conversation with Eric Brunsell about the value of Personal Learning Networks in pre-service teacher training
Carolyn Foote’s post Keeping It Real about “personal learning networks and how to move them into the professional practice of teachers”
Jabiz Raisdana’ post Irrelevance. I especially like where he states:”I think this is a good place to start. Our classrooms, our students, our world is changing, and as teachers we are here to prepare kids to face a world many of us our refusing to understand. That not only seems silly, but selfish. We owe it our students to be a step ahead of them at all times and guide them through this information superhighway.”

***I received a tweet today from 2 members of my PLN (@dmcordell and @dswaters) alerting me to a new publication from edublogs - a magazine! It would be cool even if it didn’t mention my blog, I promise :-) Also mentioned are my blogger friends Vicki Davis and Sue Waters! I’ll be reading this magazine as frequently as I do the official edublogs blog (The Edublogger) - daily.

***I recorded my first screencast today using Jing (remember, I just found this tool this past weekend!), and it made me realize just how difficult it is to record quality audio without ummm, well, and ok, especially when trying to fill space while pages load……..best feedback I’ve ever gotten on my “teaching voice”. What a great tool for pre-service teachers - maybe I would’ve done better if I’d had it back then! (I wanted to include the screencast here, but for some reason it’s not appearing correctly when I embed the code from Jing, possibly too large (5.3MB)? Probably better that way………)

****I was asked to be a featured writer on TheApple - a really neat online community for teachers. Here’s what their “about” page says:

TheApple.com : Where Teachers Meet and Learn via kwout

“TheApple brings members of the education community together to support and advance the profession. TheApple provides resources to promote careers in education, while fostering a community with exclusive benefits where information about the education community is provided to the education community by the community itself.

In 2008, TheApple joined with Monster Worldwide (Nasdaq: MNST) to accelerate growth and to improve the career and educational opportunities for our members. Monster’s vision is to bring people together to advance their lives, which is a perfect fit for TheApple. To learn more about Monster, visit monsterworldwide.com.”

I’m really excited about being a part of TheApple community and having my writing featured there!

Lots of fun stuff happening today, but probably the best was my hour with my English Language Learner and Learning Disabilities keyboarding class - we used a really fun game called Fowl Words to practice their typing and word-building skills. Nothing beats 6th graders getting excited about chickens laying golden eggs for extra vocabulary points………………