My Beauty Best Teacher

Technique for Dog Painting Rachel Shirley

Subconsciously allowing human characteristics to leak into the eyes of the dog portrait, such as illustrating idealised almond shaped eyes, painting pupils and irises too small on the eyeball and painting eyelashes as curving from the edges of the eyes.

• Using merely white to illustrate the eyeballs and reflections on the eyes.
• Rendering dog’s eyes in a “painting by numbers” way, such as: representing a round black dot for pupils; filling in the irises with any brown, blue or green at the artist’s disposal, and finishing off with a dark outline around the eyes.
• Leaving areas around the eyes blank, such as the dog’s brow, temples and bridge of the nose.

How to Paint Dog Eyes with Realism

The following advice for pet artists on painting dog’s eyes will help capture the true essence of a dog’s character.

Close observation is the key to painting realistic dog’s eyes in a portrait. Turning the photo upside down will help the artist override the dictatorial part of the brain that favours painting by numbers and making generalisations about how a dog’s eyes “should” look. Doing so will break down the area into abstract tonal shapes and colours. The following tips will also help.

• The eyeballs of dog’s eyes are rarely just white, but contain a multitude of other colours, including blues, violets, earth colours and crimsons. Dog’s brows will cast shadows over the eyeball, and may darken it to almost black at the point where the eyeball disappears into the eye socket.
• Highlights and reflections within the eyes are not merely white or round in shape, but often contain gradations of other colours, often blues and crimsons. Look out for objects reflected on the eyeball, creating odd shapes.
• Similarly, the colour of the dog’s irises will vary according the shadows and reflections falling over them.
• The degree to which the eye is open or the shape of the upper eyelid will have a fundamental effect upon the expression of the dog and therefore its character. Revealing too much upper pupil will make the dog look surprised; revealing too little will make the dog look sleepy. Pay special attention to the contours around the dog’s eyelids to capture the dog’s expression and character.

Pay attention to veins, tear ducts, upper eyelids and lower rims of the eye, which often appear droopy, as in bloodhounds. Not all such tissues are red, but can apparently appear crimson, blue, brown or even black.
Treating the skin around the eyes as an extension of the eyes themselves will help capture dog’s character and make the eyes look more convincing. This entails breaking down the area of the temple, brows and bridge of the nose into abstract shapes and lines and rendering them truthfully.

How to Capture a Dog’s Character in a Dog Portrait

Painting a dog’s eyes accurately is the key to capturing a dog’s character. This entails dispelling any preconceptions about how dog’s eyes should look and using close observation. Turning the photo upside down will help curtail assumptions. The oil pigments I most often use for painting dog’s eyes are as follows:

Burnt umber, burnt sienna, ultramarine, pthalo blue, permanent rose, cadmium yellow and white. For highlights I will use white, ultramarine, permanent rose and burnt sienna. I reserve black only for the darkest area of the pupils.

At Techniques for Painting Eyes on Dogs

click to buy from Amazon

• Art books on oil painting techniques

Wordle is a website designed to make "word clouds." And while there may be a tad more uses for it in, say, an English class than a math class, there are several uses for this word-cloud-making site.

Wordle is a some Java program (don't ask me for specifics...Java is still a little foreign language to me!) that allows you to type in a cluster of words (as many as you want). After you press "submit," Wordle turns the words and phrases you typed into a creative word cloud!

You can customize the colors and fonts, and play with the spacing until it looks right to you. (Wordle automatically spaces the words, but you can keep shuffling it until it meets your standards.)

Besides being fun, creative, and different, what are the uses for Wordle?

1. Students can create a Wordle with words that describe themselves on the first day of school. These word clouds could be displayed around the room, used as binder covers, and help the everyone get to know each other. 
2. Students can pick one character from a novel and type in everything they know about that character (personality traits, physical traits, background, education, work history, etc.). It gives a unique look on a novel's character, and is a little more fun than a simple character sketch!
3. Before reading a short story (or something else short -- say, an act or scene from a play?), students could type the short story into the Wordle box. Wordle naturally takes the words that appear the most and makes them largest in the word cloud. So after typing in the story (which works on typing skills), students could view the Wordle and see which words/phrases are most used. This allows them to see key terms and look up any words they don't yet understand. 
4. After reading, students could summarize what they learned (or what they know) into a Wordle cloud. They could do this for a textbook (summarize what the lesson/chapter was about), or for a novel (summarize the main theme, character, tone, etc). 
5. Create word clouds of rules or students' names and post them in your classroom -- cheap and easy decorations!

Here, here, and here are some more ideas on how to use Wordle in your classroom (I particularly love the second link!)

Although I'm most familiar and comfortable with Wordle and Tagxedo, here's a list that contains 8 other word cloud generators...you know, in case you like to have some options. ;) 

Below is a Wordle I created for my English classroom:

Voki is a free website that allows users to create a speaking avatar tool. At first glance, it may seem to be a bit of an odd tool, but it actually does have some uses in the classroom. What's more, Voki has a section on its website designed specifically for educators, so you always have other teachers' opinions and ideas at your fingertips, right on the Voki website.

You don't have to have a user account to create a Voki, but you don't really have access to your creation after it's been made/sent to someone, so I recommend signing up on the website.

You can create a character (anything you want: a "real" person, an animated character, an animal, an alien, etc.) of your choosing and customize the background to be nearly anything. Then you get to add words. You can make your character speak by typing in words, uploading an audio file, or even calling into the company and using your own voice (that part is pretty cool)! If you do the type-to-speech, you end up using a voice that's a little robotic, and you have to make sure to spell things phonetically so that the avatar pronounces the words correctly.

A friend of mine created a Voki for her 4th graders' first day of school. She did the call-in feature and made the avatar mimic her own appearance. This was her welcome message for the class: the students viewed/listened to this as soon as the bell rang. I've used it as a welcome message on the home page of my website. Some of the students think it's cool, but some find the robotic voice a little creepy, lol, so maybe it's best to use the call-in feature. :)

Uses for Voki in the classroom:

1. As a getting-to-know-you activity, all students could create Vokis to represent themselves. The Voki could speak essential information, favorites, etc. about themselves, and then all students could play their Vokis for the class. 
2. After reading, students could create a Voki to summarize what they read. This could be with a textbook or a novel -- it doesn't matter. 
3. After reading a story, students could pick their favorite character from the book. Then they could create a Voki that speaks from that character's POV.
4. On a similar note, students could create a Voki of a famous person or a historical figure ("I am George Washington.") and make the avatar speak facts about that person's life and achievements.
5. Instead of always posting things to your classroom website in words, you could create a Voki to get the information across. For instance, I have embedded a Voki into the class blog entry before, and used it to ask the blog questions for that post. I ended up including the text, too, because I was afraid students wouldn't have speakers available, but...in a perfect world...
6. For students who have just written a story, they could make an avatar of their choosing, and then use the call-in feature to read their story to the world!
7. Students could create a mini-lecture to teach other students the material from certain parts of the notes or text. (I feel like I'm grabbing at straws with this one...)

I'm anxious to search and hear more options for Voki in the classroom. I know there have to be more out there!



Here's an example of a Voki...this is the one that I created for my last blog post at FHS in 2011.

If you've been following my Twitter in the Classroom series, you know it's time for {Part 3}! (Catch up {Part 1} and {Part 2} here, if you need to!)

Here are our {Part 3} discussion topics, if you're ready:

• Tweet Suggestions (For Teachers)
• Twitter Projects/Activities (For Students)

Tweet Suggestions (For Teachers)

Here are some suggestions for things you can tweet to your student/parent audience:

1. Reminders about assignments that are due or upcoming quizzes/exams/projects. 
2. Reminders about snow days, picture days, sporting events, field trips, spirit days, etc. 
3. School events and/or their outcomes (plays, musicals, art shows, academic meets, etc.) -- especially ones where your school won/did well or is playing a rival!
4. Hints about how to complete an assignment or project.
5. Bonus points that can only be aquired through Twitter. (I've tweeted, "Go to the class website and scroll to the bottom of the page. The first student to describe to me the newest object at the bottom of that page gets 5 bonus points." The purpose of this, of course, was to get students to view the class website and the newest important tool on it!)
6. Helpful websites that could assist them academically (StarFall, CliffNotes, Online Calculator, etc.)
7. Apple/Blackberry, Android apps they might find helpful. (I recently tweeted about Flashcards+ and Sundry Notes!)
8. Books you recommend (I always have some students who have a hard time finding something interesting to read. I read books from my classroom library and tweet short blurbs to interest students in the book!)
9. Vocabulary words/definitions in a Word of the Day (#WOTD) format.
10. A poll to help your classroom/planned lessons (I recommend using Twtpoll!)
11. Exit ticket answers. (If students ask a question on an exit ticket, you could answer it on Twitter. This allows everyone to benefit from the answers without taking up any class time. Afterwards, you could copy/paste the updates and post the dialogue on your classroom website so those that couldn't access Twitter at the time can still get the knowledge. (For instance, I did exit tickets after an introductory lesson about courtroom trials, since my students would be conducting a trial about the characters in a book we'd just read. Some students were still confused on the process of the courtroom, and I gave them a chance to anonymously ask any question they still had. I answered these questions on Twitter, and it was a hit!
12. Motivational/inspirational quotes

Twitter Projects/Activities (For Students)

For all of these activities, there are a couple of ways you, the teacher, can keep track of students' answers and assess, if need be.

1. The main way is to create a hashtag just for your class. For instance, I might specify #MrsKEng1 for my 1st hour English class. From that point forward, if I wanted to find my students' tweets, I just type #MrsKEng1 in the search bar and read away! (Certain Twitter apps allow you to save search terms for quick retrieval. Just something to check into!)
2. Another option is to create student lists. You can create a list for all of your students, and then divide them by class and/or subject. When you want to read their tweets, just click on the name of the list on your right sidebar. 
3. Ask students to "mention" you in every single classroom-related tweet. 

With that in mind, here are some projects/activities I've thought of that use Twitter in the Classroom:

1. Schedule a chat. For instance, I might specify the #MrsKEng1 hashtag and assign a start time of  7 pm. Ideally, at 7 pm, students would log on and use the search box to find our class's hashtag. We can then have an online discussion of classroom topics outside the walls of our classroom. Whether you make this an actual assignment or an extra credit activity is, of course, up to you. You could discuss anything from an in-class topic to a President's speech on television to a movie you all went to see!
2. Peer-to-peer tutoring. Encourage parents/students to tweet questions. Other students/parents could check the hashtag and answer peer's questions. We learn best when we teach! I'd definitely suggest monitoring this activity to ensure that all questions are answered accurately.
3. Exit ticket. At the end of class, ask students to whip out their cell phones and tweet a quick exit comment/question to the cyber-world. Hopefully, these tweets generate a discussion or other students answering their peers' questions. (Of course, you would want to make sure all students had access to texting before you proceeded with this experiment. I've heard that you can use Google functions to text, but I haven't tested it yet.) You also get a quick evaluation of who understands the material.
4. Summary of the day. Whether you've just taught a math lesson or you've just finished another chapter in the class novel, students can tweet a 140-character summary of the day's lesson. In order to make assessment easier, you might consider having students either tweet this as a "reply" or include the class hashtag. (Just so you know, both options lessen the number of allowed characters/tweet.) Students could "re-teach" the jist of today's lesson. 
5. Short answer quiz questions. Of course, <140-characters/tweet is a short short answer! But if you're able to explain/answers something in such a short and concise manner, you're probably more likely to understand it.
6. Twitter as bellwork. This feeds off the last suggestion, but immediately upon entering the room, there will be questions or a discussion prompt on the board (or tweeted by you). Students must respond to the question(s)/discussion prompt while you take care of those mundane "house-keeping" duties (attendance, lunch count, etc).
7. Summary of text. After reading a chapter in a novel or expository textbook, ask students to tweet  summary of what they just read. 
8. Timeline report. Follow a celebrity or company and track their tweets over time. Then write a report over their day-to-day life. This could work as a biography project or even for a business class. 
9. Find students in another school/state/country with whom your students can tweet back and forth. It would be challenging to convey all information in 140-character segments, but that might create more concise writers. 
10. Create a class story. One student can start by tweeting the beginning line to a story. Students then take turns to tweet a class story, one line at a time. This collaborative project works on writing skills, creativity, and sharing.
11. Getting to know you. As a back to school activity, ask students to describe themselves in 160-characters or less. If students' Twitter usernames weren't easily recognizable, you could even play a game where students must guess which student belongs with which tweet!
12. Character tweet. After reading a novel, students can pick a character from the story and tweet, say, 5 status updates throughout the day. Each status update should be written in the 1st person format, as if the student were actually the character. 
13. Historical tweet. Feeding off the previous suggestion, you could ask students to pick a person from history and impersonate them on Twitter throughout the day. What would Abe Lincoln have to say if Twitter was available during his time? A website called Historical Tweets might help with this!
14. Hashtag timeline. Monitor the hashtags over a period of time to see the trends of our society. This would be great for a history or current events class. 
15. Hashtag quick write. On a random day, write the current trending topics on the board. Ask students to write about a curtain hashtag either individually or as a group. They could write their thoughts, create a story, etc.
16. Personal story. Using the 3 parts of a story, ask students to write an entire story in 420-characters or less (140 for the beginning, 140 for the middle, and 140 for the end). 
17. Micro-research paper. Ask students to create a micro-research paper using the Twitter guidelines. The intro paragraph must be 140-characters, the thesis must be 140-characters, the first paragraph.... you get the idea. Each part of the micro-paper must comply with Twitter character count rules. 
18. Spelling race. Tell students a word in class and see who can tweet the correct spelling the most quickly. (You could also do this for math problems, science/history trivia questions, etc.)
19. Vocab race. Tweet a word and see who can reply with the correct definition the most quickly...or vice versa.
20. Vocab sentences. Tweet a word and ask students to reply with a tweet that uses that vocab word correctly in a sentence. 
21. Synonym game. Call out a word and ask students to tweet synonyms.
22. Book club. Students tweet book blurbs in an effort to get other kids to read great books.
23. Attendance. Some days, give yourself a break from taking attendance and do it on Twitter. My suggestions: use the bellwork response tweets as a way to take attendance. You may still need to double-check this one because of two main reasons: 1) present students could text the bellwork question to an absent classmate, who would then tweet the bellwork in a timely manner. 2) Present students who don't participate would be counted absent. :-/

 I'm all tapped out of ideas for now. What suggestions do you guys have? 


Continue: Twitter for the Classroom {Part 4}

From Richard Reeves at the Prospect:

The three key ingredients of a good character are: a sense of personal agency or self-direction; an acceptance of personal responsibility; and effective regulation of one's own emotions, in particular the ability to resist temptation or at least defer gratification. Progressives are realising that, thus defined, character is intimately linked to many of their social goals—and also that it is unevenly distributed. Indeed, inequality of character may now be as important as inequality of economic resources...[continue reading]

via 3QuarksDaily

• To Figure Out Unknown, Children Rely Less on Words Than Adults Do

  If you work with younger children under the age of 5, you will want to look deeper into this research that shows that words mean less to children than adults when trying to categorize things. ""In the past, we thought that if we name the things for children, the labels will do the rest: children would infer that the two things that have the same name are alike in some way or that they go together," he said. "We can't assume that anymore. We really need to do more than just label things."

  tags: learning research prek preschool language kinderchat

• Character Building Improves Quality of Education

  This is a research study I want to read. "A study of 20 elementary schools in Hawaii has found that a program to build social, emotional and character skills resulted in significantly improved quality of education. The program, which is centered on activities to build character, only takes about an hour a week away from traditional education, but has led to fewer suspensions, lower absenteeism, and better reading and math scores on standardized tests, researchers say".

  tags: education learning character

• For Better Grades, Try Bach in the Background - Miller-McCune

  If you are going to flip your classroom, new research suggests you may want to use classical music as your background music. "New research from France finds students learned more when a videotaped lecture was underscored with classical music. "

  tags: research learning education flippedclassroom music

• Physical activity and better school performance, a closer look - latimes.com

  The LA Times carried an article about the link between physical exercise and learning. it is about time, although the primary conclusions of the several studies are that more studies are needed. cuttng PE may be cutting your test scores. Any Mom of a boy knows that they do better with some rough and tumble in their day (my daughter does too.) ".In the collection of studies, the article's authors found two they deemed high-quality, with both showing a strong correlation between exercise and better school performance."

  tags: learning research health_teacher pe health

• Research in Learning Technology ~ Stephen's Web

  Awesome news. "Research in Learning Technology is the journal of the Association for Learning Technology. It aims to raise the profile of research in learning technology, encouraging research that informs good practice and contributes to the development of policy."

  tags: learning research

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Walter Russell Mead gives some great advice to students going back to school. The whole article is filled with advice and suggestions, but for the sake of brevity, here are some of the best parts:

The real world does not work like school. Life in school is life in bureaucracy. You follow the rules, do what you are told, and rewards follow. That’s the old system; the new one won’t work that way. Creativity, integrity and entrepreneurial initiative will pay off; following the old rules and hoping for the old rewards is a road to frustration. You have to fight the tendency of the educational system to turn you into a timeserving baby bureaucrat, following the rules and waiting for the inevitable promotion.

Most of your elders know very little about the world into which you are headed. Most faculty members, especially the tenured ones, have worked and lived in a world that is passing away. In many cases it’s hard for them to imagine the kind of lives you will live, and you need to keep this in mind.

You are going to have to work much, much harder than you probably expect. Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning. There’s nothing written in the stars that guarantees Americans a higher standard of living than other people. Those of you who spend your college years goofing off in the traditional American way are going to pay a much higher price for this than you think.

Choosing the right courses is more important than choosing the right college. Your generation can’t afford to throw these four years away; choose your courses carefully and seriously.

Get a traditional liberal education; it is the only thing that will do you any good. However, in times of rapid change, it is paradoxically more useful to immerse yourself in the basics and the classics than to try to keep up with the latest developments and hottest trends.
 
Character counts; so do good habits. Character and spiritual grounding are going to count much more in the tumultuous, uncertain environment that is approaching than in the more stable and bureaucratic world of the past. But in a world in which employment is less secure, competition tougher, and your reputation for integrity and productivity are the most important assets you have, character is going to count.

The one piece of advice I would add is that students, whether they be in high school or college, need to read on their own. They can't cede their mind to the institution- if only the government is putting information and thoughts and theories in your head, than that is a very bad thing. Students should always be reading a book they choose on their own, and should be rotating fiction with non-fiction or biographies. Don't let someone else have total control over your education- educate yourself on your own on your own time too.

Earlier last week I was critical of Obama's response to Tunisia's revolution, where it appeared that rather than take an active role in events, Obama's administration simply sat on the sidelines and tried to figure out where Tunisia was (I'm kidding- I heard that he had a 40 minute briefing on Tunisia after the revolution broke out- I'm sure he learned about it then). He is dangerously incompetent, especially on important world events that our President is supposed to be the primary actor on in our political system. The revolution in Tunisia though was just the start of something bigger, something that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has taught us will have repercussions lasting decades, and that is the revolution that is taking place right now in Egypt.

For the past couple days I have been trying to get a handle on events there, much like our President, and like usual, my reactions have mirrored Obama's. First I first supported the young revolutionaries against the bad dictator, while Obama supported the bad dictator. But now I support the bad dictator over the evil militant terrorist groups who want to take power in Egypt, while Obama now supports the evil militant terrorist groups (he supports them by not saying anything bad about them while saying bad stuff about Mubarak- that's an upgrade over his usual 'voting present' by showing support for the bad guys). Obama is dangerously incompetent again and once again, anyone who voted for him or his party made our nation and world a worse place by doing so.

The best article that I have found to help me get a handle on what is going on in Egypt appeared today in the Jerusalum Post by Caroline Glick called Our World: Clueless in Washington. I am going to pass on some of the better parts of it to you to help you too understand a little bit better what is going on in Egypt...

The Egyptian multitudes on the streets of Cairo are a stunning sight. With their banners calling for freedom and an end to the reign of President Hosni Mubarak the story these images tell is a simple one as old as time.


On the one hand we have the young, dispossessed and weak protesters. And on the other we have the old, corrupt and tyrannical Mubarak. Hans Christian Andersen taught us who to support when we were wee tots.

But does his wisdom apply in this case?

Certainly it is true that the regime is populated by old men. Mubarak is 82 years old. It is also true that his regime is corrupt and tyrannical. Since the Muslim Brotherhood spinoff Islamic Jihad terror group murdered Mubarak’s predecessor president Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egypt has been governed by emergency laws that ban democratic freedoms. Mubarak has consistently rejected US pressure to ease regime repression and enact liberal reforms in governance.

This reality has led many American commentators across the political spectrum to side enthusiastically with the rioters. A prestigious working group on Egypt formed in recent months by Middle East experts from Left and Right issued a statement over the weekend calling for the Obama administration to dump Mubarak and withdraw its support for the Egyptian regime. It recommended further that the administration force Mubarak to abdicate and his regime to fall by suspending all economic and military assistance to Egypt for the duration.

The blue ribbon panel’s recommendations were applauded by its members’ many friends across the political spectrum. For instance, the conservative Weekly Standard’s editor William Kristol praised the panel on Sunday and wrote, “It’s time for the US government to take an active role… to bring about a South Korea/Philippines/Chile-like transition in Egypt, from an American-supported dictatorship to an American-supported and popularly legitimate liberal democracy.”

The problem with this recommendation is that it is based entirely on the nature of Mubarak’s regime. If the regime was the biggest problem, then certainly removing US support for it would make sense. However, the character of the protesters is not liberal.

Indeed, their character is a bigger problem than the character of the regime they seek to overthrow.

According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.

When given the opportunity, the crowds on the street are not shy about showing what motivates them. They attack Mubarak and his new Vice President Omar Suleiman as American puppets and Zionist agents. The US, protesters told CNN’s Nick Robertson, is controlled by Israel. They hate and want to destroy Israel. That is why they hate Mubarak and Suleiman.

WHAT ALL of this makes clear is that if the regime falls, the successor regime will not be a liberal democracy. Mubarak’s military authoritarianism will be replaced by Islamic totalitarianism. The US’s greatest Arab ally will become its greatest enemy. Israel’s peace partner will again become its gravest foe.

What has most confounded Israeli officials and commentators alike has not been the strength of the anti-regime protests, but the American response to them. Outside the far Left, commentators from all major newspapers, radio and television stations have variously characterized the US response to events in Egypt as irrational, irresponsible, catastrophic, stupid, blind, treacherous, and terrifying.

They have pointed out that the Obama administration’s behavior – as well as that of many of its prominent conservative critics – is liable to have disastrous consequences for the US’s other authoritarian Arab allies, for Israel and for the US itself.

The question most Israelis are asking is why are the Americans behaving so destructively? Why are President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton charting a course that will necessarily lead to the transformation of Egypt into the first Salafist Islamic theocracy? And why are conservative commentators and Republican politicians urging them to be even more outspoken in their support for the rioters in the streets?

Does the US not understand what will happen in the region as a result of its actions? Does the US really fail to understand what will happen to its strategic interests in the Middle East if the Muslim Brotherhood either forms the next regime or is the power behind the throne of the next regime in Cairo?...

...As Prof. Barry Rubin wrote this week, “There is no good policy for the United States regarding the uprising in Egypt but the Obama administration may be adopting something close to the worst option.”
 
Unfortunately, given the cluelessness of the US foreign policy debate, this situation is only likely to grow worse.

Two more years remain in President Obama's term of office. Hopefully voters in America will wake up and realize how dangerously incompetent his administration has been and how destructive the impulse to take a flier on this unknown was.

Animoto is a picture/video service. Anyone can make a free account, but to access certain features, you have to pay an upgrade fee. However, educators can get a free version of this updated account by simply verifying that they work for a school system. Hooray for websites that value educators!! :)

After creating an account, Animoto users submit a series of pictures to the website. Users can customize the video and add music (either your own tunes or stuff sponsored by Animoto). When you submit a project, Animoto turns the photos you submitted into a video by shuffling the photos creatively and adding the music to the background. The result is a very professional-looking photo video!

It's SO simple to make an Animoto video, so I definitely encourage all to at least try it!

As a teacher, you can take pictures of your students and turn them into an Animoto video for the class website or for parent/teacher conference night. You could also compile pictures from your last year in class and create an Animoto video for the first day of school so your new students know how much fun is about to happen this year!

On the student side, there are a few things kids could do:

1. In an English class, students could pick out a character from a novel they're reading. Then they could collect Google images that depict that character's personality, and add music to complete the video.
2. After reading factual material, students could collect Google images that depict the main theme of the text. 
3. If a video camera isn't available for recording projects, students could take pictures of each other performing a project/skit, and then compile the pictures to form an Animoto video. 

The Animoto site has a page full of sample videos you can view, and here's a screen shot of one of the vids:


As you can see, not only can you add pictures and videos, but you can also add slides of just text. This has so much potential for classroom use!

Through the beauty of wikipedia I recently went on a journey from reading about the movie Top Gun to Val Kilmer to Tombstone to List of Historical Drama's to spotting a movie called Ironclad. It is one of these movies which we in the states might not be able to see but quite honestly is likely better than most of the garbage that will be in the theaters here.

Ironclad is an upcoming historical drama and action film that is soon to be released in the UK.  It is about a ragtag group of Knights Templar who hold out for months against the hard-fought siege of Rochester Castle by King John in the thirteenth Century. Set in the time of signing of the Magna Carta treaty, the group struggles against the King to defend the freedom of their country. Judging from the trailer, it looks like it is going to be a bloody good time! The cast includes includes Paul Giamatti, James Purefoy, Brian Cox, Mackenzie Crook, Jason Flemying, Derek Jacobi and Kate Mara.

Here is the trailer:


The overseas market was also treated to a great movie on Solomon Kane, which I wrote about earlier:

Solomon Kane is a fictional character created by the pulp-era writer Robert E. Howard. A late 16th / early 17th century Puritan, Solomon Kane is a sombre-looking man who wanders the world with no apparent goal other than to vanquish evil in all its forms. His adventures, published mostly in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, often take him from Europe to the jungles of Africa and back.

In the world of Solomon Kane there is Evil. People do evil things (thieves steal and murderers kill), there are evil empires (decadent and peopled by barbarous people), and there are evil spirits present (ghosts and such). Solomon Kane has but one purpose in life, and that is to fight evil, going wherever God's will draws him. A hunger drives him forward, an urge to right all wrongs, to protect those weaker, and to avenge all crimes against right and justice. Wayward and restless, he roams from place to place consistent in one respect only- that he will be true to his ideals of justice and right. Such is Solomon Kane.

Although Solomon Kane is not my favorite Howard character (my favorite is El Borak), I enjoy the stories, and find myself, as I always do when I read Howard, transported back to some sort of primordial time, some sort of time-before-time, perhaps a time period in my childhood when dreams and reality where closer together, or maybe Howard just awakens some sort of ancient stirring in my soul. All I know is that it is very fun reading, and if you haven't picked up a Solomon Kane book yet, you should.

Thus I was very excited to stumble on this trailer, for the Solomon Kane movie. It came out in Europe back in February of 2010, but has not yet made it to the States yet, and there is no DVD available yet for it, but hopefully there will be soon, because it looks like a sweet movie.

It never got into the theatres here yet, but I did notice that you can buy a DVD of it! Follow these links and buy your copy today of the Soloman Kane movie!  SOLOMON KANE [2009, UK] for the movie, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane for the book!

Solomon Kane is a fictional character created by the pulp-era writer Robert E. Howard. A late 16th / early 17th century Puritan, Solomon Kane is a sombre-looking man who wanders the world with no apparent goal other than to vanquish evil in all its forms. His adventures, published mostly in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, often take him from Europe to the jungles of Africa and back.

In the world of Solomon Kane there is Evil. People do evil things (thieves steal and murderers kill), there are evil empires (decadent and peopled by barbarous people), and there are evil spirits present (ghosts and such). Solomon Kane has but one purpose in life, and that is to fight evil, going wherever God's will draws him. A hunger drives him forward, an urge to right all wrongs, to protect those weaker, and to avenge all crimes against right and justice. Wayward and restless, he roams from place to place consistent in one respect only- that he will be true to his ideals of justice and right. Such is Solomon Kane.

Although Solomon Kane is not my favorite Howard character (my favorite is El Borak), I enjoy the stories, and find myself, as I always do when I read Howard, transported back to some sort of primordial time, some sort of time-before-time, perhaps a time period in my childhood when dreams and reality where closer together, or maybe Howard just awakens some sort of ancient stirring in my soul. All I know is that it is very fun reading, and if you haven't picked up a Solomon Kane book yet, you should.

Thus I was very excited to stumble on this trailer, for the Solomon Kane movie. It came out in Europe back in February of 2010, but has not yet made it to the States yet, and there is no DVD available yet for it, but hopefully there will be soon, because it looks like a sweet movie.

My Fake Wall is a spin-off of Facebook but has educational purposes in mind. ...OK, maybe it wasn't exactly created FOR education, but we can use it for educational reasons!

 My Fake Wall allows users to create a fake facebook-look-alike account. This may sound like a play-only tool, but what if our students were to step into someone else's shoes and make a facebook account for them? ...Say, Albert Einstein? Michael Jordan? Thomas Edison? Queen Elizabeth? George from Of Mice and Men? William Shakespeare? The list goes on and on. This is a way for our students to really dig into someone else's life while utilizing the tool they love so much: Facebook.

If you're going to study a particular piece of literature, maybe you could have the students do research over the author and create a fake wall profile as part of the anticipatory set. Or, after the novel is over, you could have the students pick their favorite character and create a fake Facebook over that character.

History folks, what about impersonating a famous historical figure? Science people could ask students to research and write about a famous scientist. Math folks...you know where I'm going with this, right?


It's a biographical study that allows students to present their information in a way they enjoy: mock Facebook. Furthermore, the website says users can actually share their fake Facebook walls on their own personal Facebook accounts. So...what if you created a class Facebook page and allowed every student to post his/her fake account information onto the class Facebook wall?

Ben Franklin's fake wall. Source

...Just throwing out ideas.

I like this for a few reasons:

1. In order to create a Facebook account for another person, the creator has to know a LOT of information about that person! (Have you ever noticed how much stinkin' information Facebook wants from you?!) This encourages some research, but it probably won't FEEL like research to the students, since it's for something "fun," like Facebook. 
2. This is a more creative assignment than a regular ol' report over someone's life!
3. You could "go green" by asking students to post to the class Facebook wall, print copies of their fake accounts, or even take screen shots and e-mail them to you.

I think I'll try to use this next year!

• kibin

  Students are already peer reviewing each other's work using kibin.

  tags: education grammar peerreview p2p language literature bestpractices techintegrator

• Flat Classroom brings world closer - Pelican Press

  Another great local press coverage of how our amazing Flat Classroom teachers are collaborating. This is a story that our communities are hungry for. Social media is great but social learning is transformational. The best teachers are attracted to the Flat Classroom projects - apply now at www.flatclassroomproject.net

  tags: education flatclassroom inthenews digitalcitizenship edu_news

• The 35 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You - Edudemic

  Awesome! RT @FlyontheCWall for later: The 35 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You : http://ht.ly/5CXkW #5thchat

  tags: 5thchat twitter education

• College Readiness with Knewton's Adaptive Learning Platform™

  Colleges are struggling because incoming students aren't ready for the rigors of college. Here is a clip of a press release about how some colleges are using Knewton.
  
  "Today, educational technology company Knewton announced that its award-winning Adaptive Learning PlatformÔ has been selected by Penn State University (PSU), University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), the State University of New York (SUNY), and Mount St. Mary’s University to power college readiness courses that will help condition incoming students for the rigors of college-level academics and identify and address academic areas of improvement for each student. Recognizing the successful implementation of blended learning at ASU, both state universities with large student bodies like SUNY, Penn State, and UNLV, and small selective private universities like Mount St. Mary’s are turning toward Knewton’s Adaptive Learning PlatformÔ to power their college readiness programs.
  
  
  
  College preparedness continues to be an issue that impacts students across the nation and can hinder a student’s chance of completing a four-year university program. According to the Alliance for Excellence in Education, 50 percent of students who enter college remediation programs fail to reach graduation. "

  tags: education college

• Create, Share and Learn with a Global Repository of Tests

  Online test site for homework or review. Let the computer do what it does best.

  tags: education assessment techintegrator all_teachers tests repository

• Junior Scholastic Home

  Digital Scholastic is free for the rest of this summer and is being marketed for your IWB. Looks like some interesting content.

  tags: education elementary middleschool

• The Kids Are Ready | Classroom Applications

  Nice write up on how Brad Flickinger is running his elementary classroom with a lot of high-quality technology equipment where the students serve as mentors for each other. Love this model.
  
  Hat tip: Robert Madden

  tags: education flatclassroom learning mentoring elementary_teacher bestpractices elementary

• Multimedia Learning Resources - Educaplay

  There are some free activities here but this is a tool to develop multimedia activities for LMS systems. It is in beta.

  tags: education lms multimedia elearning

• The Solar School Initiative

  This website helps US public schools install and pay for solar power.

  tags: education environment greenenergy edu_news administrator

• Best College Scholarships and Grants. Compare, reviews & ratings.

  Search tool to help you find the best scholarships online. With a high school junior, I'll be working here.

  tags: education scholarship college edu_news

• MySchoolHelp

  Website by a 17 year old high school students in a Silicon Valley incubator. Looks interesting. "Find and share notes with your friends."
  
  If we don't help them share - they will. If they learn is it cheating?

  tags: education collaboration flatclassroom

• Educator Application « 140 Character Conference

  Got a note that if you want to go to the 140 character conference for education and are an educator you can attend for $1.40. Here is the application, it is coming up August 2/3rd.
  
  "Your readers / subscribers may join us for a special price of $1.40 (seriously) if they apply here and prove they are part of the education community. Otherwise, participation is $140.00 for the two-day event. "

  tags: education twitter edu_news

• DEN Research | Discovery Education

  Membership study of Discovery Educators network and the impact on their professional development. While I have just become someone that you CAN book through Discovery for speaking (to be on their website soon) I do learn a lot from DEN.

  tags: education professionaldevelopment edu_news

• Global World History Project: And We're Off...

  A teacher is working on a global world history project and is looking for friends and partners. If you teach history in high school, he's looking for more partners.

  tags: education flatclassroom globalcollaboration history

• Beginners » The Krazy Coupon Lady

  This isn't related to teaching but IS related to managing a household and saving money. I have some friends who are going crazy about how the krazy coupon lady is saving money. Times are tight and I think my teacher friends out there will like this website.

  tags: education money budgeting

• Design presentations automatically - VisualBee PowerPoint plugin

  Visual bee looks at the words and text on your slides and helps "soup up" your powerpoint presentation for you. There is a free plug in for PowerPoint. If you've gotta use it, perhaps some of the intelligence in here would be beneficial for you

  tags: education presentations techintegrator all_teachers

• | Marble Jar

  Apps are emerging like marble jar to help give children rewards and promote long term behavior improvements. This may work for some kids. I prefer the hug and kiss method myself. ;-)

  tags: education parenting

• Museum of Science and Industry | About The Museum | Press | Month at the Museum 2

  I love this! Apply to spend a month at the museum and win $10,000 in the process. Here is the info:
  
  "The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago is once again holding a nationwide search for a live-in roommate for Month at the Museum 2, an innovative experiment where one curious and adventurous individual will have full reign of the Museum for 30 days and win $10,000. Last year’s roommate captured the imagination of people around the world. "

  tags: education museum contest

• How to Send a Direct or Private Message on Google+ ~ LockerGnome Social Media & Technology

  (Hat Tip to Danita Russell for sending this to me)
  
  Here is how you private message people on Google+

  tags: education google+ edu_news edu_newapp

• Philips' Luminous Wallpaper Will Create the Mood Lighting of the Future | Popular Science

  Excited about the LED wallpaper and the potential it has for making learning spaces more powerful and engaging. This self-luminating wallpaper takes "mood lighting" to a whole new level.

  tags: education building design edu_trends

• Geekteach: 3D Printing In the Classroom -- InformationWeekGeekteach: 3D Printing In the Classroom - personal-tech Blog

  Cool article on 3D printing in the classroom. There are so many great applications for this! I'm excited it is finally coming.
  
  Hat tip for this one to the president of our tech support contractor, Paul Blough from Bloughtech - great company to work with.

  tags: education printing

• Kids News and News Articles for Kids - GoGoNews -

  "Big news for little people" this website is targeted news for kids aged 7-14 and may be something you can use in your classroom. What a fascinating discussion you could have about July 13th's topic the "crazy basketball court." 

  tags: education currentevents news all_teachers edu_news

• The OrganWise Guys: At Home

  A childhood obesity program centering around some really cute puppets. These guys are cute. They have a program you can use in health class too.

  tags: health obesity education science elementary

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

World renowned author and speaker Zig Ziglar teaches timeless principles of leadership that can help you become a strong leader in any vocation. Not only that, he helps listeners develop a deeper understanding of success by understanding principles of achieving success in life and business. His advice includes a nine step program that details how to develop a winning attitude to help you achieve optimal success.

A positive attitude is key to becoming a good leader and learning how to build people up in order to keep your business growing. Develop a positive outlook on failure, and understand why it is an event and not a person. The manner in which you treat people will pay rich dividends.

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America is an exceptional nation- a nation that was founded and built on traditions and ideas in a way that no nation had previously tried and no other nation has since duplicated. The ideas are put forth in our Declaration of Independence- all men are created equal, no man is better than you at deciding how you run your life, government is created for very limited purposes, and that these mainly are to protect your freedom of choice, to protect your life, and to protect your property which was the product of your hard work and labor. As I have written about many times, these ideas are under daily attack by those unexceptional nations who would drag us back into their petty jealousies, and by those who support these nations out of belief that America has something to apologize for or that the monarchs and empires of the past are to be admired and emulated.

Traditionally, our nation has been a nation of immigrants who come here expecting nothing other than to be rewarded for their hard work and not be judged based on their race or class, and traditionally our nation has been a nation built on rule of law, not rule of strong men ruling by decree. These traditions are also under attack by those who immigrated here expecting others to work hard for their benefit, and rule of law is slipping badly in our nation.

One other great tradition that America was firmly built on is Christianity. This Christian spirit animated our nation and our nation's leaders from the beginning to today, and is firmly a part of our character. While other Christian nations around the world have had slipping church attendance and little vigorous debate on the nature of God and God's Word, in our nation many still go to church and healthy and moral debates continue to be engaged on the nature of God.

This traditional Christian character of our nation is an important part of our tradition, and has been enshrined in our Pledge of Allegiance, which we all know and say from birth as:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

But this tradition is under attack as well, by well meaning individuals who believe that out nation will be improved or strengthened in some manner if God is driven underground and killed. They object to saying the pledge, usually by hiding behind nameless others who might possibly be offended by saying that the United States of America was founded and remains as one nation under God. They seek to remove the words 'under God', believing that it is possible to pick and choose what parts of America they like and support. Today they remove the phrase 'under God', but it has always been my fear that once that phrase is permitted to be removed, others will soon follow, and our traditions will be torn asunder and our foundations as a nation will shatter and we will fail.

Sadly, this is what is now happening. The election of Barack Obama was a bad gamble that our nation took, a leap of faith on someone who did not earn it, and the empowering of the liberal wing of his party, a Democratic Party that has moved far away from most people, further took our nation down a path of failed ideas and rejection of traditions. On Sunday, while many people sat down on a great Father's Day to watch the U.S. Open Golf Championship, they saw how far our nation has gone down this path when one of the major networks altered our nation's Pledge.

NBC on Sunday decided to cut the words "under God" from the reading of the Pledge of Allegiance that accompanied the beginning of its coverage of the U.S. Open Golf Championship. Seconds after that, there was another reading of the Pledge, and this time, in addition to cutting out the words 'under God', NBC went further and cut out the words 'one nation' as well, dishonoring all of the thousands of dead who fought to keep our nation one nation during the US Civil War. Watch the video yourself.

NBC later issued an apology, but I wonder, what is next for the liberals who run NBC, who support Barack Obama, and support the liberal radical left of the modern day Democratic Party? Will they next drop out the words 'with liberty', since they don't believe that I truly have the liberty to run my own life however I want and need to be ruled over by elites in Washington? Will they drop out 'to the republic', or maybe alter it 'to the democracy', thereby changing our nation from a nation of laws into one where strong men can do what they do and the rest of us must suffer under their tyranny? What is next for our nation, if the traditions of our nations can be so casually rejected by a major network?

For your classroom, think about getting one of these posters- I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the USA - Classroom Motivational Poster or I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America - Classroom Motivational Poster.

One of my brothers recently was invited by the Michigan House Republican Strategic Task Force on Education to come and discuss the long range vision of education policy in the state of Michigan. This special task force composed of Republicans has been touring the state looking for both successes and failures in Michigan's education system. It was on the west side of the state and after talking to my brother about how it went, I have the following comments to pass on to you.

What the task force does is get input from parent teacher associations, student council members, administrator, teachers, board members, and students, from public schools, special education, alternative education, charter and private schools. The end goal is to develop ideas on how to improve the quality of the education system here in Michigan.

The result of these task force meetings is predictable and an indication of everything that is wrong with education in our state. Three hours of discussion produced all the wrong policy suggestions for education, suggestions politicians should not consider. The following account is a way for you to see how policy is created in our state and helpful in developing your own opinions about the future of education.

The first step in the discussion was to answer the question "What is the purpose of education?" Do that right now in your head- think about what you want the education system in our state to look like and do. Is it prepare students for college? Prepare them for future jobs? Mold good citizens? Give all students a broad base of knowledge? Or did you, like most people at this forum, say "everything!" The mission of education needs to be focused, clear, and consistent, and it can not be everything to everybody all at the same time. There is only enough time in the day, only enough resources to spend, and our state needs to think long and hard about what they want the goal of education to be.

In my opinion, our school system should move to a two-tier system- K-8 the goal is to provide a broad range of knowledge for all students, and 9-12 students will either go into a college-prep track or a job-preparation track. That's just my opinion though.

The next question the group that came to this task force meeting was asked is "what are we doing well right now in education?" Think about this question. Education is doing a lot of things well- babysitting students 8 hours a day, running great sports programs, educating a lot of top students, running a good special needs program, helping students learn how to think, giving students opportunities, offering many innovative learning styles, and nationally our K-5 program is the best in the world.

The next question the task force had us think about was "what do you want the education system to look like 10 years from now". I think the overall consensus of the task force was that we want education to do more to teach students critical thinking skills, to learn how to be innovative and creative, to teach entrepreneurship and job creation, and to have students focus more on the career paths that they are headed into after school rather than just focus on school.

The last step is the most important step, and the step that resulted in disaster for this task force and that produced information the Michigan House Republican Strategic Task Force on Education should utterly disregard. The question that was posed to us was "how do we build on what we are doing well to make our education system look like we want it to look 10 years from now?"

Here is the information the task force received, and it is a good lesson on why sometimes special interest groups should not be the ones designing the policies in our nation. The task force was told to drop all standardized testing and to just hand the money to districts with no more accountability. The task force was told that one way to increase the education levels in our state was to give more funding to teachers, have them work shorter hours, and give them more training. The task force was told that students should teach classes, as if they were subject matter and teaching experts. The task force produced a lot of garbage ideas, and in every hearing they conducted they pretty much got the same garbage.

This is why the state should not be trusted with running any sort of service industry. The failures in education are the failures of government planning and funding. The failures of education result from this idea that bureaucrats working in distant locations can issue rules and decrees and that will somehow make things better. And the failures of education and this process demonstrate that a system that ignores values and character will produce a valueless result.

The way to fix education is to increase choice, increase personal responsibility, increase local control, and increase the focus on value and character education. Students need to take classes that emphasise creativity and entrepreneurship and they need to buy into the system by making them realize just how much it is costing them to go to school (or at least their parents need to realize what the cost is for education and then demand the results to justify the cost). Standardized testing needs to be increased, but the information that comes from these tests needs to be disseminated throughout the system and analyzed and studied by everyone- teachers, students, and administrators.

Education needs to run more like a business, with the service provided being learning and the learning delivered by skilled professionals. It can not run like a government agency, answering to dozens of constituents and staffed by bureaucrats.

Please take a moment to look up your state Representative and pass on your thoughts to them about education and the types of policies that you would like to see put in place in this state. If you don't speak up, they will have only heard from others, and those others are pushing groups like that Michigan House Republican Strategic Task Force on Education to put in place policies that will only erode the educational quality of our great state.

UPDATE: Here is a story about the event... notice the utter lack of anything productive or useful mentioned in this article.