Month: May 2014

Presented in collaboration with the Association for Middle Level Education.

Jokes You Can Use:

“They call him Maestro”

A guy walks into a pet store wanting a parrot. The store clerk shows him two beautiful ones out on the floor. “This one’s $5,000 and the other is $10,000.” the clerk said. “Wow! What does the $5,000 one do?” “This parrot can sing every aria Mozart ever wrote.” “And the other?” said the customer. “This one can sing Wagner’s entire Ring cycle. There’s another one in the back room for $30,000.” “Holy moly! What does that one do?” “Nothing that I can tell, but the other two parrots call him ‘Maestro’.”

A wife asks her husband, a software engineer…

“Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk, and if they have eggs, get 6!” A short time later the husband comes back with 6 cartons of milk. The wife asks him, “Why the hell did you buy 6 cartons of milk?” He replied, “They had eggs.”

To the optimist, the glass is half-full.

To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty.

To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicamisener/21-jokes-so-stupid-theyre-actually-funny

Eileen Award:

• Twitter:  Jason Hovey, Tara Becker-Utess, Anna Asti, Andrea McKay, Kevin Sigaty, Jerri Wood,
• Google+: Heather Valdespino

Advisory:

10 Jobs that will

http://mashable.com/2014/04/28/jobs-of-the-future/

Middle School Science Minute

byDave Bydlowski (k12science or davidbydlowski@mac.com)

MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE MINUTE-HAND WASHING

I was recently reading the January, 2014 issue of Science Scope, a magazine written for Middle School Science Teachers, published by the National Science Teachers Association.  One of my favorite sections in each Science Scope is the “Scope on Safety” section, written by Ken Roy, Director of Environmental Health and Safety for Glastonbury Public Schools.

Ken shares his advice on hand washing.

From the Twitterverse:

Strategies:

Google Lesson Plans

We’ve created a series of lessons to help you guide your students to use search meaningfully in their schoolwork and beyond.

On this page, you’ll find Search Literacy lessons and A Google A Day classroom challenges. Our search literacy lessons help you meet the new Common Core State Standards and are broken down based on level of expertise in search: Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced.

A Google A Day challenges help your students put their search skills to the test, and to get your classroom engaged and excited about using technology to discover the world around them.

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searcheducation/lessons.html

Resources:

Curriculet

Create/Use classroom texts that include mark ups, notes, and quizzes. Uses Google sign in.

www.curriculet.com

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

http://twinery.org/

Google Classroom

Welcome to a preview of Classroom, a new tool coming to Google Apps for Education. Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease. And it lets students organize their work, complete and turn it in, and communicate directly with their teachers and peers.

Classroom was designed hand-in-hand with teachers to help them save time, keep classes organized, and improve communication with students.

http://www.google.com/edu/classroom/

Web Spotlight:

Digital Reading Poses Learning Challenges for Students

By Benjamin Herold

Comprehension may suffer when students read on the digital devices now flooding into classrooms, an emerging body of research suggests.

When reading on screens, for example, people seem to reflexively skim the surface of texts in search of specific information, rather than dive in deeply in order to draw inferences, construct complex arguments, or make connections to their own experiences. Research has also found that students, when reading digitally, tend to discard familiar print-based strategies for boosting comprehension.

And many of the multimedia elements, animations, and interactive features found in e-books appear to function primarily as amusing distractions.

…also quick to acknowledge a big problem: “I understand better when [text] is on paper, because it’s all right there, and it’s not skipping ahead and back all the time.”

A study last year by Heather R. and Jordan T. Schugar, a wife-and-husband research team at Westchester University of Pennsylvania, found that a small sample of students comprehended traditional books at “a much higher level” than they comprehended the same material when read on an iPad.

“We live in two worlds now,” she said. “We have to adapt.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/05/07/30reading_ep.h33.html?tkn=PMMFo4tLGmh6NCiNzQJqSzJEzUsX5Cmy25wx&cmp=ENL-DD-NEWS1

Kindergarten show canceled so kids can keep studying to become ‘college and career ready.’ Really.

An annual year-end kindergarten show has been canceled at a New York school because the kids have to keep working so they will be “college and career” ready. Really.

This didn’t come out of the blue. Kindergarten (and even preschool) has increasingly become academic — at the expense of things such as recess and the arts — in this era of standardized test-based school reform.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/26/kindergarten-show-canceled-so-kids-can-keep-working-to-become-college-and-career-ready-reallyV

Random Thoughts . . .

eCommunity for Moodle

Personal Web Site