Ciào!

Last post using my opetechtalk url---on to www.marierush.blogspot.com !
Hope to see you there!

Earth Day Resources

I have been scouring my Twitter universe for great sites that pertain to Earth Day. Most of them are posted here, but some of them require more than a 140 character description. Earth Day – a time to teach your class about our environment and how to preserve our planet, is such a global (pardon the pun) opportunity for education.

Going without shoes to represent the need for shoes for children around the world, social media and it's impact on the fight against malaria, recycling efforts, global warming and climate change---wow! I think we need an Earth year, or possibly an Earth life, which now as I typed it made perfect sense.

I hope your Earth Day provides you with opportunities to not only teach your students, but learn from them. This will be their Earth.

Schoolhouse Rock

Rocks!

Skype, and a Reunion

Image via Wikipedia

So, today, it finally happened. I had been dreaming about connecting my kids and teachers with the outside world, and I did it today, in the greatest way! I had Ms. Donna Hicks Skyped in from her duty in Iraq. She is a 6th grade teacher in our little school, and she has been missed.

This is the first of many interactions I hope to share with my students and faculty. The sixth grade is discussing potential careers, and so I am setting up a series of calls where the children can ask real people in real places in real professions how it really is. If you have a cool profession, or know someone who does, please, please contact me here or here . If they don't have a video camera, that's fine, we can do an audio chat. I'd like to figure out how to get a variety of professions--and usually when I set out to figure something out, I end up somewhere new, so I'll see where this leads. I have the 6th graders at 9:00 am EST.

In the meantime, thanks to Donna Hicks for being the catalyst for new types of learning for our students and teachers. What she didn't see in the webcam were the glistening eyes of caring, from afar!

Okay, How Cool is This? World, Please Meet VoiceThread.

If You Give a __ a __

What a wonderful activity, and so visually stimulating and thought provoking. I love it when teachers take the reins and do things just one step better than they did last time! If I remember correctly, this was the first time this teacher put a VoiceThread together. Enjoy!