CAWP Dines with NWP Project Outreach Tonight some members of the Chicago Area Writing Project and I will be eating good at the Parthenon Greek Restaurant with a group of site leaders of the National Writing Project's Outreach Initiative. Should be a very enjoyable time. OPAH!
2:35:32 PM  #  comment []

Bay Area Writing Project Blog Pat Delaney of the Bay Area Writing Project http://www.bayareawritingproject.org/foundreading/ is pulling strands of information around the interoperability issue in educaton as well as laying out the way blogs are and can be used in education here at http://interactiveu.berkeley.edu:8000/MiraJohnson/ You can also meet the mostly newly initiated webloggers of the Bay Area Writing Project.
2:11:04 PM  #  comment []

Photoshop Elements Training Yesterday we had two general trainings on Photoshop Elements with only staff. Our early elementary staff is really into digital images. I just show the basics for printing or screen projects and tips. They are the ones who will provide the imagination on contextual uses and new types of products. Since each classroom also has at least one high end IMac with CDRW burner. I showed them how to burn a CD of their collected images with Toast. They all went away to their classrooms for about 15 minutes and burned their images and came back for the the end. Working with the early elementary staff is the most humorous. I have to say that some humor cannot be repeated online. I am laughing now as I write this.
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Teacher Observation on IBooks and Blogging 1 We have two types of Pen Pal projects in third grade. One class will be using E-Pals and two others are using their classroom Manila web site. I can say that the kids get very excited with the iBooks. (I can understand, It happens when I see a Apple Titanium Powerbook. ) We are learning as we go along. Room 202 wrote messages in Spanish yesterday to their e-pals who are New Trier high school students learning Spanish. I guess one quick observation by the classroom teacher was that children who regularly struggle to write were very motivated. We were able to to get all iBooks logged on their classroom weblog with one classroom email account. Each classroom has only one general email account from CPS. The classroom email account is associated with the content editor membership. I walked the children through the process with a projector. Each student after being logged in started a story. We had a standard title given., "Hola" with the name of the high school counterpart. Each student signed off with their first name and first letter of their last name. The teacher, Allie Epstein, modeled the writing process to her conterpart at the high school on the projector screen.

Needs work:

Keyboarding skills

Keyboard shortcuts for Spanish accents and punctuation.

Cut time in getting the iBooks set up in classroom.
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