Care to take a peek at what pulled together?   http://neccsessions.wikispaces.com

This type of poetry is created by taking a black marker and making poetry by coloring around the words in a newspaper article. The video below shows some grade 8 students trying it out! Very cool.

A 15 year old by the name of Alex has become quite an internet phenomenon with his beatboxing skills. One of his youtube videos has in excess of one million hits.

I had the privilege over the last few days to work with Shaneen Jessome, a middle school teacher who decided to incorporate beatboxing with her middle school language arts poetry lesson. Grade 8 students worked in partners to write poems and then used Audacity to record rhythms with the multiple tracks.Too cool! Here are two great ones:Kris and Josh (Click to listen)Courtney and Shelby (Click to listen)

I am absolutely giddy about geocaching and wish to tell you about our PD session. Geocaching involves taking a GPS system and locating caches, or hidden treasures, using latitude and longitude coordinates.

We had the opportunity last week to present geocaching to the Vice Principals in our District. I have one word to describe the experience……fun, fun, fun!

We hid 4 caches in Oromocto. VP’s were placed in groups of four and given 2 gps units per group. We programmed the gps’s with the waypoints and away they went.

We wished to model a math lesson, so we hid fraction playing cards in each of the caches. The winner had to return back with all of their cards and show us that they understood equivalent fractions by matching the pairs.

Here is one of the VP’s after her first find:

Here’s what I learned:

• Some VP’s are competitive
• Geocaching is a great way to build teamwork
• People love “doing” things (adults are no exception)
• You could apply geocaching to any subject….hide Math questions in caches, assemble story starters for Language Arts… you could geocache in Science by placing caches beside areas in nature that you want them to notice….oh the endless possibilities.

So, I was all fired up from the PD session and went home afterward bound to find a cache by my house. [This is where the demented comes in.] So I found one that was close and away I went.

Now, if you have been reading my blog, you will remember that we had record snowfalls this winter. Well, that snow is still on the ground, especially in the woods. And there are underground rivers under that melting snow too!

Needless to say, after my experience, I have decided to forgo geocaching expeditions in the woods until either a) the snow is melted or b) I buy a pair of hip waders. I sank in the snow up to my waist and discovered an underground river when I reached the bottom. :-). But I did find that cache!

No,  its not because I can wear my shorts in spite of the dirty melting snow.

Neither is it because I can pack my car scraper and shovel away.  [Even though this makes me very happy.]

April is officially my new favorite month because April is Christmas in the District. The end of March signifies the end of the budget year and time to spend any outstanding funds.
This year some schools in our District received Discovery Education Streaming.  Yesterday we gave it to the teachers at our notebook school and today we had the opportunity show the principals.  Listen, you have never seen teachers so happy.  It truly was like Christmas!

HoHoHo….I love April!

Great idea!  I love screencasting.  I am hoping to grab a small piece of her video so I can post it here for all of you to see!!

Boy, if my math teacher had made screencasts for me in 1984, who knows, I might have been the next John Nash!

I digress.

A month ago, Jeff and I were scheduled to present to the University of New Brunswick students on Technology and the Provincial Acceptable Use Policy. We had never given this presentation before and were counting on being able to work together on the Tuesday and then present the following day.

But school was cancelled!

Usually storm days are celebration days in my house. Not that day. Buried under mounds and mounds of snow, there was no chance that we would be able to meet to plan our presentation. Let me tell you, the panic was setting in!

Then I remembered Google Presentations.I had remembered Vicki Davis, a presenter at the ACTEM conference in Maine, using Google Presentations, so I thought I would give it a try. Jeff and I were able to work on the presentation together in real time and finish our slides in a few hours…pain free! The best part was the collaboration that Google Presentations offers. We would not have been able to do this with PowerPoint.

The screenshot above shows over 400 revisions that we made. We were even able to make a .pdf version of our presentation in the event of internet failure. The students loved it.

Take that cruel winter! Ha!

Me: Why aren’t you wearing your Crocs anymore?

Her: They aren’t cool.

Me: Why? I love mine.

Her: Hello! The teachers are wearing them now! When the teachers start wearing them, they aren’t cool any more.

HA!

We had this conversation last Spring and I was thinking about it the other day. Do students think about some technologies the same way they think of their “outdated”footwear? Once the teachers start using it, they move to something else….

Just wondering…

 I love the beautiful wallpaper  made by digital artist Vlad Gerasimov.  In fact, I love it so much I added one of this works as my blog header (see above), and have plastered his work on my blackberry, my laptop and and my new desktop computer!  I especially love the “Alice in Wonderland” wallpaper that he has created. 

His work is whimsical, and suffused with emotion.

You can get free wallpaper on the site, or pay a small subscription fee and become a member for life!  Vlad Studio makes me happy!