Diigo is a big hit again!

Well this week I had so many interesting leads from Diigo that I spent all evening reading lesson ideas and wikki ideas that I never did get to my "homework" ! I found this great site to download Lego building blocks for use on the Mac or PC, http://ldd.lego.com/download/default.aspx Other sites about wikki's in the classroom and a new site called VoiceThread, http://voicethread.com/ which is great for using with young children. They showed an example of a discussion about a picture with all the members of a family that were in the picture even though they are all grown now.
And even a world meal site that encourages making a typical meal that the average person on the planet eats, http://wilderdom.com/games/descriptions/WorldMeal.html the site encourages us to make a meal like this for a group and hopefully they will each make it for a group and a snowball effect will occur. Interesting I might try it with one of my classes?

Copyright permission

I saw a comic in the Wash Post that would be great in my portfolio. So I e-mailed Creators Syndicate for permission to use it, and they granted it. I'm so excited! I never thought it would be this easy or I'd get the permission so fast. Wow, now I'll share this with my students and we can talk about honesty which is our value for February, and how this is the honest way to borrow a copyrighted item and give credit to the original artist.

Diigo news

Now that I'm signed up with Diigo I had my first week's worth of ideas. One I really like: http://www.mrallsophistory.com/fire.html, a lesson plan to use with older students but I can see a possible way to include younger students too.
I also found this site http://www.whitehousehistory.org/ click on the "American President" on the left side. They have a great song recorded there with pictures too for help with remembering our 44 presidents. I'd like my third graders to hear this song and come up with other pictures for each president. Maybe we could add this song to our "United States" song for remembering the 50 states.
There is just so much out there I could spend all day online.

Twitter experience

So yesterday I signed up for a free twitter account. I had played with this briefly early last year but decided I'd try it again. So far I'm following Marc Warner our senator and some actor from CA is now following me. This is strange and I'm not sure I like it. I don't know him and I'm not sure why he would choose to follow me.
I have also signed up for Diigo, it's cool to have this as part of my Firefox bookmark bar, so if I go to an article I wish to bookmark and is relevant to education I can also click the Diigo symbol and it will be saved there as well. I'm interested if anyone else has tried twitter or Diigo?

Wiki's

After reading the three chapters in Richardson I have learned so much!! I've created my own wiki and I'm trying out Diigo, sounds very cool. I'm not sure yet how I can use this in my classroom but I'm sure as I read how other teachers are finding ways to incorporate wiki's and blogs I will find ways to also use these great tools.

Facebook & teachers

We spoke about this in class last week and it came up today at work, Facebook, teachers & parents. What does a teacher do when invited to befriend a parent? Those that have accepted are really caught, what happens when they blog about not really being sick the day they call in sick?
If you ignore a request by a parent will that parent feel bad? How will that be conveyed to the child at home. Your student who probably knows you didn't befriend their Mom? Or are parents keeping that to themselves? It's very hard to figure this out anyone have some ideas?

I need to present something to our after school staff (college students from GMU) about how they should respond to a parent request to friend them on Facebook or Myspace? My first inclination is to say ignore the request but I'm not sure that is correct. Maybe create other pages just for parents and students to see?