It’s the end of the year. Personally,I have really mixed feelings about this time of year. There is still so much to do. Plus, crazy as middle school can be, I really love working with the kids. I’ll miss them this summer as we send them off. It will be nice to get some time to prepare for next year. And of course, we’ll finish getting ready to “go live” with the podcast.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Had an interesting conversation the other day. One of the points of discussion was what teachers really use the internet for. Well, it seems for that small group, the number one answer was…….finding lesson plans. 
I’m not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, it probably is a good place to start. On the other, there are so many rich directions that the internet and technology could travel to help students grow and develop. 
Well, there certainly are many places to find lesson plans. Here are a few:
– Teachers.net (Harry Wong is big here)
– Big Sky (Oodles of lesson plans, but older)
– Discoveryschool.com
– Apple Learning Interchange

Do you utilize lesson plans from the Internet? Do you have a favorite site?

Powered by ScribeFire.

Although WebQuests have been around for quite a while, some teachers have never really gotten into them, some have forgotten about them and some were never exposed to them. With summer coming up, it might be a good time to take a look at them once more. I found this page about webquests that has a couple of things going for it.

1. It is a actually designed as a professional development experience. The idea behind the webquest is to look at a couple of other webquests with a group.
2. It contains active links to 4 different webquests.
3. It is middle school centered.

A couple of points that need to be considered. Webquests can be a wonderful teaching opportunity. However, just like any other strategy, they can also be abused or pointless. Too many WebQuests have become simply a “reporting of information”. That is, instead of addressing the higher level thinking skills that WebQuests were designed to address, they’ve become another “information recitation” project. Too many of the WebQuests that I’ve seen lately simply involve reading and summarizing (necessary skills of course). WebQuests are an opportunity to go far beyond that. By definition, WebQuests should involve students to analyze, synthesize, exercise judgment, exercise creativity, and problem-solving skills in a task that authentic version of situations that they may be facing now or will face in the future. This is the power of a WebQuest. Like many other strategies, this is one that should be in your toolbox. This is also a terrific strategy to address the needs of differentiation. Ah, but that is another post.

Had a really busy Middle School kind of day today. I decided that I could use a little rejuvenation. I saw this the other day. It reaffirms at least some of the things that I believe. Please note that I don’t necessarily accept all of the statistics or ideas put forth in the presentation. However, I do think that it is a good discussion starter. Take a look.

Download: Posted by jsdt4 at TeacherTube.com.

You’ve heard of YouTube. Certainly your students have. Much of the video on YouTube is inappropriate for educators to use. However, there is no denying the power of video. What if there were a similar site specifically for teachers? Wait, there is. Check out TeacherTube.

We’re looking for an icon. Not an idol, but an icon. We need a symbol to help people recognize that they’ve made it to the right place. If you have a suggestion, let us know.

We’ve done it! We are now off of Blogger on onto our very own little piece of the world (or at least our own very little piece of the world wide web). Currently we have set it up as a blog. We’ll try that out to see how everything works. If need be, we could switch to a more traditional web page. However, with the advancements in blogging software, this should allow for more interactivity. We’ve copied over the old posts so those are still available. Now that we have this part done (???), we are working on getting the podcast ready to go for Fall 2007. Still much to be done there. Time will fly be quickly.

Hope to see you soon. We’ll post things here occasionally, and continue our work.

While we are still working on some pesky technical issues, we have pretty much worked out one issue. We’re going to move to a “real” web page. Look for a link to follow once all the registration stuff has gone through (and someone writes us a web page).

Cheers.