Contact John Stritt (jstritt@esu10.org) if you have questions about the connections, etc.

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Title:  Poetry Pals:

Status: Open

URL: http://projects.twice.cc/?l=collaboration&id=645

Connections: H.323

Grades: 11, 12

Subjects: Language Arts/English

Dates: March 1 - April 30

Description: Creative Writing teacher with one class of 11th and 12th graders seeks to work with one other teacher and class of students to share poetry. Would like to initially meet via Videoconference and then have students exchange ideas and poetry via email during March. We would culminate the project in a Poetry Slam in April via videoconference. Videoconferences would take place from 12:45 - 1:50 PM EST.

This looks like a REALLY fun project to do with your students!  If you have wanted to try blogging with students or some other collaborative, global projects, this is the one for you!  Check out this project web site! Even if you only want to try a portion of this, I think it would be worth your time.  This is for students from k-7th grade and it was started by a 2nd grade teacher!  Check it out and let me know if you want help!

http://sites.google.com/site/misschatz/home

Here are a few web sites that I thought you would like. 

• Good general lesson plan sites - http://tr.im/KjRO
• Science Fair site - http://www.sciencebob.com/sciencefair/index.php
• You Tube URL Tricks - http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-youtube-url-tricks-you-should-know-about/
• ReTool Yourself (professional development ideas) - http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/25886
• 100 Web Tools for Collaboration - http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/26378

This last link is a video from a student demonstrating how her 7th grade science class is being run.  This looked like a very engaging science class!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEls3tq5wIY&feature=youtu.be&a

I just read this article and found it fabulous!  Check it out!  http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/25762  This article is about some engaged, 24/7, self-directed learning!  See for yourself!

How can you take these same lessons for elementary students and apply them to your classes?  How can you engage your students so they are guiding their own learning by their own interests?  Who do you need to involve to make your classroom look like his?  Please share your comments here! 

Looking for something other than shopping this Sunday?  Come on out and join us for our December First Sunday @ Rowe starting at 1:30 p.m.  http://rowesanctuary.org/first%20sundays.htm

With native grasses and fallen leaves rustling in the breeze and the symphony from flocks of birds streaming south, late fall is a great time to explore Rowe Sanctuary.  This month’s program will take advantage of this natural music by offering a workshop called ‘The Music of Nature - The Nature of Music’ presented by former UNK professor of music Annabell Zikmund, and Rowe Volunteers Susan Elmore and Jackie Flohr.  

Other activities include nature hikes and marshmallow roasting on an open campfire!

For more information:
Keanna Leonard, Education Director
Audubon's Rowe Sanctuary
44450 Elm Island Rd
Gibbon, NE  68840
308-468-5282

If you haven't had a chance to check into Shmoop, it is a MUST over your weekend or holidays.  Shmoop is a very unique web resource for literature, history, and music teachers.  I recently received an email from them.  When I saw it, i thought it would be a GREAT idea for a language arts thanksgiving lesson plan!  I have included it below.  See what you think!  This might be a fun activity to do cross-curricular with the social studies teacher!  Then go to Shmoop and see all the other great resources that they have!  I think you will really like it.  You will probably need to get an account and you can sign up for their mailing list from there.  Don't forget to share your lesson with the rest of the group here on the community!

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Shmoop's Top 20 Thanksgiving Dinner Guests from Literature & History
Food, friends, naps, and good conversation. What could be better than that? Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks with the people we love. We at Shmoop have decided to invite our best friends to our Turkey Day feast - we're grateful for them, after all.

Now, we just have to figure out who is going to sit next to whom:

Top Five Best Dinner Guest Pairings

These dinner guests will get along like - you know - peas and carrots, ice cream and pie, Aunt Nene's green jello and marshmallows (how the heck does she get those marshmallows to float, anyway?)...

1. Scout Finch and Huck Finn:
Watch a childhood crush develop as Scout and Huck share exploits, plan adventures, and show each other their slingshots. When nobody's looking, they'll steal the silverware, find treasures in the hole of a neighbor's tree, and meet up with Jim on the river.
 
2. Holden Caulfield and Hamlet:
These two sensitive, maladjusted young men should have enough in common to keep them talking the whole night. Both privileged? Check. Both lovesick? Check! Both despise liars and phonies? Check! Both going to tackle the world's hypocrisy head-on? Checkmate!... Whenever they can get around to it, anyway.
 
3. Grendel and Luna Lovegood:
Letting Grendel into the room is a fast way to kill a good dinner party, so don't seat him next to anyone faint-of-heart or vegetarian. The un-fazeable Luna Lovegood will make Grendel feel right at home by asking him all about mythical monsters and swapping tales of run-ins with humankind. And if Luna's magic wand can't keep Grendel in check, maybe her radish earrings will.
 
4. Porphyria's Lover and Madame DeFarge:
Porphyria's Lover is a passionate, poetic, thinky-feely kind of guy who likes long walks on the beach and staying up all night to admire the corpse of a strangled girlfriend. None of your other guests will want to get near him, so throw him in a corner and use Madame DeFarge as a buffer zone. Her attitude? Bring it!
 
5. Alice and The Walrus:
Who has a better resume for spending an evening with The Walrus? Alice has extensive singing-walrus experience from traveling through the Looking-Glass, and with her mind so radically opened by her adventures in Wonderland, she'll be the only guest who has any idea what "cu-cu-cachoo" means.

Top Five Worst Dinner Guest Pairings

Only the brave host would seat these duos together. If the mashed potatoes start flying, don't say that we didn't warn you...

1. Edgar Allan Poe and Ulysses S. Grant:
Nothing is more embarrassing than watching friends and family getting blitzed at a dinner party. Poe liked his absinthe and Grant was a reported alcoholic, so if you want to give your other guests a fighting chance at the wine, make sure to stick these two at opposite ends of the table.
 
2. Jay Gatsby and The Giver:
Letting these two get on a roll is bound to make everyone depressed. Everything was better in the good old days, they'll tell you: the men had more hopeful futures, the women were more loving - heck, even the colors were brighter!
 
3. J. Alfred Prufrock and Teddy Roosevelt:
Blankets don't get much wetter than J. Alfred Prufrock, so be careful not to seat him next to a carouser like Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy was so famously high-energy that when he invited a foreign ambassador to join him for a day of sports, the ambassador is said to have collapsed from exhaustion.
 
4. Hedda Gabler and The Misfit:
Sometimes, having too much in common can be a bad thing. Hedda Gabler is bored, manipulative housewife who breaks up relationships, destroys careers, and encourages people to commit suicide for entertainment. Similarly, The Misfit is an escaped convict who murders an entire family along the roadside because he wants to do something mean before the police catch him. The last thing these two need, aside from cutlery, is an evening picking each other's brains.
 
5. Emily Dickinson and Boo Radley:
The only thing worse than a conversation gone wrong is no conversation at all. These two notorious recluses might not be the liveliest guests at the table. But, who knows, maybe they would hit it off after passing soap carvings and crumpled-up poems to each other under the table.

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Yesterday at CTE 2.0, many were talking about doing the school newsletter/newspaper online.  I have had this link for awhile and I know there is one teacher in our area that is using this.  Here is the link to create your own online magazine http://www.openzine.com/aspx/HomePage.aspx.  I don't know if there is an educational version to this but I wonder if you can't just set up the magazine and then students would only go to that site to edit rather than the main site.  They may also offer an "educational version" of this if there are enough requests.  I don't think it is a bad site just doing my initial scan.  Check it out!  Are there other sites out there that would work for doing the same thing?  Does this have any other features that Word Press doesn't have?

Share your thoughts on this site!  What does your school's web presence entail?

I just read this article and I found it interesting; thought you would like it. They are talking about how Google with On Demand Books can reprint books for you at a decent price.  http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/18/google.books/index.html  It is really pretty amazing what they can do with books these days and how accessible Google is making those books. 

If you have never been to Google Books, you will have to try it!  There are more and more books going out of print that are available online at http://books.google.com along with books that are still copyright protected that the author is making available on Google.  While you are on that site, if you have a Google Account, you can keep a library of all your favorite books or maybe a library of the books you read with your students.  Even if your book is still under copyright, there may be portions of your books on the site.  There are other features available once you get into your library such as writing book reviews or "clipping" pieces from the book.   Check it out and let us know how you might use this with students!

Tell us your favorite lesson, website, tech tool, or idea for your classroom!