This is an amazing resource - for teachers of all languages and levels. The site contains masses of scanned books that you can search, browse and read.

Their Mission:
The mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to excite and inspire the world’s children to become members of the global community - children who understand the value of tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas — by making the best in children’s literature available online.

The book in the image has text in Spanish and English on facing pages and would be a good one for using if you were teaching the language. Picture books are a great way to share any language …

You can browse through the book in the same way you read a real book. There is a whole project focused on sharing quality books that sits behind this site. Well worth a look!

http://www.childrenslibrary.org/

Thanks to Jane (my wife, who is a Speech language therapist - and is now a convert to Bloglines!) for finding this ….

Coming from strong Irish (County Tipperary actually!) stock I love this:

Ireland at it’s best

After having dug to a depth of 10 meters last year, Scottish scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.
Not to be outdone by the Scots, in the weeks that followed, British scientists dug to a depth of 20 meters, and shortly after, headlines in the UK newspapers read: “British archaeologists have found traces of 200 year old copper wire and have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than the Scots.”
One week later, “The Kerryman,” a southwest Irish newsletter, reported the following: “After digging as deep as 30 meters in peat bog near Tralee, Paddy O’Droll, a self taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely nothing.
Paddy has therefore concluded that 300 years ago Ireland had already gone wireless.

LOL!!!!

Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog is one of my favourite bits of reading. Is thoughtful, funny and ireverant take on schools, learning and libraries is great.

His recent ‘concerns’ with creativity resonated with me … bought back a conversation about the indignance an art teacher colleague feels towards those home renovation shows where the whip-up an art work in 5 minutes at the end of the show for a room. How much value does this put on creative ability and art?

All this started me reflecting a bit about creativity in schools and education and technology and listing a few concerns:

Concern 1: Creativity isn’t always about art. I tend to appreciate creative problem-solvers, as much or more, as those folks who are creative in a more “artistic fashion.” Or maybe I should extent ‘art” to dealing with people and situations in new and effective ways? The creativity I admire most, especially in my staff, is simply figuring out a way of accomplishing a task in a better way. Or dealing effectively with a problem - mechanical or human. I hope we never narrow what constitutes a “creative” endeavor.

Concern 2: Creativity must be accompanied by craft and discipline. Most of us when we look at a Jackson Pollock (yes, I do know his name), usually think something like, “Geeze, give a) a monkey, b) a little kid, or c) me a can of paint and I can make a painting like that.” You’d be wrong. Even abstract artists understand balance and tone and just plain exhibit great craftsmanship/technical skills. The most original written ideas in the world are inaccessible when locked behind faulty grammar, spelling, syntax or organization. GarageBand will not cure a tin ear. Too many folks, kids especially, think that sufficient creativity will overcome a lack of skill or need for discipline or necessity for practice. Creativity unaccompanied by drive, self-discipline or just hard work and practice ain’t worth a lot.

Concern 3: The world is not really interested in your art, but that’s OK. Real talent is given to a very few. The rest of us sort of plug away, mostly to please ourselves. I had a couple ancient, maiden aunts who painted what even I as child knew were grotesquely odd versions of things like the Mona Lisa or a badly listing landscape or the portrait of a favorite dog - or maybe it was a cat. Some works hanging about their house may even have been paint-by-number kits. But I think they got great pleasure from the creative process. And they didn’t insist on making others look at their work or try to sell it. Neither should you.

Concern 4: If we ask students to demonstrate creativity or innovation, we need some tools to determine whether they have done so. Like pornography, I don’t think I can define creativity, but I think I know it when I see it. But that won’t cut it in the assessment world. As much as I admire ISTE for including creativity as one of their student tech skill standards, I am not sure it is fair to hold students to account for mastering it - if we can’t describe what it looks like, provide models, and be able to somewhat objectively determine whether a kid can “do” creative.

To all the creative people out there - keep up the good work! But no, I don’t want to read your novel or watch your interpretve dance. Sorry.

I hope like anything that we are not going to be expected to determine whether a child is a level 2 or level 3 creative! Sort of like leveling ‘key competencies’ in our new NZ curriculum.

Mac OS X Leopard only: Run quick calculations from Leopard’s Spotlight search box. Enter your formula and the answer will appear as you type, similar to how it works in Firefox’s Google search box. Google’s implementation is a tad better; it can do metric conversion (try 24km in miles), but Spotlight’s good for pure math.
source

I got this on the email from a friend in Christchurch yesterday and have forwarded the email to everyone I can think of. I am not normally into email chain letters but I love this!

AREN’T YOU ALL SICK OF THOSE HIGH PAID TEACHERS??

Their hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work nine or ten months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do… baby-sit!

We can get that for less than minimum wage. That is right. I would give them $3.00 dollars an hour and only the hours they worked, not any of that silly planning time.

That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 AM to 4:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children.

Now, how many do they teach in a day… maybe 30? So that’s 19.5 X 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

Let’s see . . . that’s $585 x 180 = $105,300 per year.

(Hold on! My calculator must need batteries!)

What about those special teachers and the ones with master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage just to be fair, round it off to $7.00 an hour. That would be $7 times 6-1/2 hours times 30 children times 180 days =$245,700.00 per year.

Wait a minute, there is something wrong here!

There sure is, duh!

Make a teacher smile; send this to someone who appreciates teachers!

(Average teacher salary $50,000/180 days = $277per day/30 students = $9.23/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student.) Very inexpensive babysitter and they even educate your kids! Crazy!

A good one to point out next time a parent is complaining about school being closed for snow, or whatever. I want to see what the logic wold say a Principal should earn having to supervise all the supervisors … must be at least double! About $500 000 a year would do me nicely!
Have a good one …..

so Lifehacker tells me:

Online storage website Box.net has thrown open the doors and let all sorts of webapps in, giving users a handful of one-click actions and exports for their files. That means MP3s stored at Box.net can be sent to Myxer for ringtone conversion, documents can be opened in ThinkFree or Zoho or faxed through eFax, and the list runs to eight more services at this point, with more likely to come. Along with RSS file sharing and desktop mounting, the free 1GB of space offered to everyone is becoming a handy tool. Box.net requires a sign-up for its free service, as do all of the web services it currently links to.

This is a great online storage service that has a handy set of ‘tools’ that can be imbedded in blogs, wikis, etc for sharing files.
If you have not had a look it is worth checking out ….

Michael Fullan talked about the implementation dip - where performance, enthusiasm etc fall off just after an initiative is put into place. Competence then increases and performance improves beyond the previous base line given time, practice, experience etc.

I think that often the picture is a bit different. My blogging is certainly a good example of where performance and enthusiasm increase markedly at the outset, then drop off and eventually come back to at least the base line level. I am finding it difficult to prioritise and get very enthusiastic about blogging at the moment. School is very busy and we have a of of balls in the air at the same time:
* Two staff appointments
* An ICT PD Cluster to get orgaised and off the ground
* Some major behavioural issues to address from children
* all the end of year-ness to keep ahead of
* a new classroom to get on-site and organised
* an internal upgrade of two classrooms to get organised before the reunion next year
* classes for 2008 to get sussed
* etc, etc, etc….

Not complaining …. I applied for his job and LOVE it. Just full-on at the moment ….

so … do you see change as showing an immediate dip, or where the initial enthusiasm carries on for a while and then things fall off a bit over time … to come back as things get fully embedded? What do you find in your school??

A bit of a ramble but I hope you get the point of my question …

Check out this wiki of activities to support oral language, phonological awareness and phonics skills.

There are some very cool activities linked in here. Being married to a Speech Language Therapist I have a bit of a focus on this sort of stuff. It is also, I believe, vital for children to have good phonological awareness (etc) before they will be ready to learn to read.
This sort of user-generated content is a great way to support programmes ….

I would be interested in any other places/sites/resources you have found. Check out my delicious site for more ideas Jane or I have found.

another gem from Lifehacker. I have to get my hands on one of these!

The Eye-Fi secure digital memory card adds Wi-Fi to any camera and supports automatic wireless uploading to your computer as well as tons of different web-based photo sites, from Flickr and Facebook to Picasa and the open source Gallery2. You just plug the card into your camera and set up wireless access from your computer, then snap pics like normal. Whenever you’re in range of your wireless router, Eye-Fi will automatically upload the pics; if you’re not in range, Eye-Fi will upload them when you are (it’s also a regular 2GB memory card). The Eye-Fi will set you back $99, but it’ll also rid you of the cord and cradle clutter of your traditional sync tools.

This would be soo cool for little bodies, and much easier on the hardware than plugging and unplugging cables!