Zoho Notebook

Here's an interesting program: http://notebook.zoho.com

It looks like it has real possibilities for educators, though I haven't played with it enough to have thought it through. If you come up with ideas, please add them in the comments area. I'll be thinking too.

Skype fun

Wow, my resolve to blog more often sure did fall apart. I've been having too much fun on Skype, connecting with my beautiful new granddaughter. (Okay, I do have to enlist her parents in this effort, but they are most cooperative!)

Meantime, I can't help but think of how useful Skype could be for educators. (Skype allows you to easily use your webcam and microphone to connect with others via the Internet.) Since it's free and extraordinarily simple to use, classes could talk to each other. Better still, classes could talk with "experts" in almost any field. It would just be a matter of teachers making the arrangements. Kids would certainly take to Skyping in a heartbeat. What a great summer project for educators...to set up Skype, experiment with it a bit, then plan to incorporate it into their September lessons.

In Skype, you locate people using their email addresses. Mine is: gailgri@gmail.com Feel free to use me as part of your learning curve. I'd be delighted to see and hear you online!

Back to Blogging

I've been enjoying myself in so many ways, and can prove it with these holiday pictures. But I've missed my blog and have left it on its own for too long. Thanks to those of you who were in the NYSCATE workshop and who emailed me afterwards. I love to hear of the good instructional use you are making of the online tools we tried together!

Here's a new and nifty way to have your students respond to the books they are reading. At LibraryThing you can create a "library" for your students. Signing in is free and you can enter up to 200 books for free...after that it is either $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime membership. If your class reads more than 200 books, it is worth every cent of $10 to keep track! It won't take you more than a few minutes to master the intricacies of this site. Your students can enter their books, read other reviews of their books, then write a review of their own. And what fun it will be to watch the list of books grow.

I ran across references to a teriffic little video called Web2.0...The Machine Is Us/ing Us. It's well worth the few minutes it takes to watch it.

Wow. It's been a long time since I posted to Musings. With my retirement in mid-August, I went on a blogging holiday. Now that things have settled down a bit, I have a ton of catching up to do in both blog-reading and blog-writing.

I was happy to see some excellent middle school activities from NASA. All three of the current modules (Tracking a Solar Storm, Star Count, and Winter's Story, are highly engaging and offer multiple opportunities for cross-curricular activities in addition to solid science. Thanks, NASA!

For the K-6 mathematicians in your life, try Math Playground. While much of the material is lower level, there are some nifty logic games here, sure to exercise young brains (and old ones!)

If you haven't discovered Gliffy yet, you are in for a treat. Sign in (it's free) and you are using fully satisfactory mind-mapping, flow-chart program. Take 10 minutes to find your way around, then use it with your classes either in a teacher-led exercise, or with small groups or individuals at their own computers.

Food for Thought

While I had to miss the best national computing conference (NECC) this year, I have been trying to keep track of what was going on. I ran across David Jakes' description of a keynote by Dewitt Jones, a photographer for "National Geographic". David's notes were enough to send me off to Jones's own site where I found, much to my joy, an article entitled "Seeing the Ordinary as Extraordinary". As I prepare for retirement from my fulltime work and ponder future adventures, articles such as these remind me of the treasure of time and limitless realm of possibilities. Thank you, David, and thank you Dewitt!