Christa McAuliffe TC Day 2

Many "good ones" today. Nicole went with me. She got some good ideas and we are going to collaborate on a webquest or mystery for French culture.

The keynote speaker was Annette Lamb who has a remarkable website that has all kinds of resources, ideas, lessons and examples. Several ideas she presented were especially good. She called them a "HOOK". In science she suggested going to the website called "The Annals of Improbable Research". There they have listed actual research that seems a little silly, i.e. "If you drop it, should you eat it?" Does the 5 second rule apply? Get kids to write the scientific experiment that could research this problem. I had students visit the twinkies website to see how a lab report should be written. This website conducts several different experiments on twinkies using the scientific method. Very funny and educational. She suggests going to the Pulitzer Prize photos site to get photos to show students. Ask them why do you think they won? What do we know about the picture? what don't we know? The CSI TV show is very popular with teens. Have them visit the CSI website and write a mystery using vocabulary from the show. Even have them produce a record of the scene with a camera. A website called "Documenting the American South" has many diaries online (Loreta Janeta Vasquez is a woman who fought in the Civil War). Also suggests FirstGov.gov as a great website for photos. You can look up photos of disasters or the Civil War.

Open Source Software: One of my goals for this conference was to find free software to do some of the things I want to do in the classroom. There are many open source programs available which are programs that people change and add to constantly. I attended a workshop on how to use GIMP a graphics program probably as good as PhotoShop but a little harder to use. It can be downloaded for free at gimp.org and there are some great tutorials at http://gimp.org/tutorials/. Another program is called Moodle. It is a program that will create online courses with activities, quizzes, a forum, chat and bulletin boards. It is server based and will have to be run by the CIC guys. There also is an open source program called Open Office that many people say is as good as Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program and spreadsheet. All for free. You can read more about them at opensource.org.

My last workshop of the day was "Podcasting with a Purpose". I wanted to learn more about it and see a successful presentation of it in the classroom. Two teachers from Maine in a 3/4 classroom are doing a weekly podcast that has the students engaged. (Their website - is bobsprankle.com if you want to hear some of the students' podcasts). They make up the programs and write the reports. They have learned about plagiarism, rewriting and the global community. I'd like to try it with possibly a reading class or maybe with a homeroom/advisory group. It is not expensive. The recording device is $60-120 and the software needed is open source programs. There is even a website, music.podshow.com, that has free music that they allow you to use on podcasts as long as you give them credit. They mentionned a program called Audacity (open source) that allows you to edit the podcasts which are in mp3 format. And I found free, open source, program to do blogging - Word Press which allows the teacher to monitor all comments.

So a good day. I found a lot of free software and the Seacoast Professional Debelopment Center in Exeter is giving workshops on many of them. For information go to their website. Also try K12 Open Source site for some free software.