Great way to start a Monday morning!

I received an email from the instructional technology specialist at the elementary school where I have done a lot of blogging projects these past few years. Hillary told me about Julie McCullers who taught third grade and had participated in a class blog in one of the projects.It was entitled McCullers Weblog. I want to point you to one of her posts from back then, A Final Goodbye. It is absolutely one of my most favorite posts coming from a classroom. It got the kids engaged and having fun as they were learning. Steve Dembo even commented to them! Julie is a creative teacher who does great work with kids. Her current blog, Blogging Along…. is so inviting! Check out this post, School Now. I like the questions she is asking the kids. I can’t wait to follow this blog this year. Welcome her back to the world of blogging! Julie has moved on to another elementary school closer to her home. We miss her but now her blog will keep us in touch and just think of the learning and sharing.

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WikipediaVision

Here’s something fun to watch: WikipediaVision. This is a visualization of Wikipedia edits happening in real-time. It gives you a real sense of what a global enterprise this is, and how varied the topics can be. In a few minutes, I watched as people edited sports, music and TV trivia, scientific articles, revised the Betsy Ross entry, and much more. (Be aware that while Wikipedia screens content, it does allow explicit language when necessary and some yucky medical terminology. Surprises may pop up.)

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WordPress 2.3: One Day Later

For those of you who didn’t see my previous post, I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 yesterday. Most of my previous upgrades have been seamless. This time, I had two problems, one of which is really puzzling to me.

The first, as I mentioned in my previous post, is that I can’t get tags to work with my theme. I have decided to continue using my plugin, SimpleTagsPlus, because it does what I want with a lot less fuss (at least for me).

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US Teens Confident In Their Inventiveness; Hands-on, Project-based Learning Needed

American teens are confident they can invent solutions to some of the world’s pressing challenges, such as protecting and restoring the natural environment, but more than half feel unprepared for careers in technology and engineering, the Lemelson-MIT Invention Index has found this year. The Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, which gauges Americans’ attitudes toward invention and innovation, also found there is an important need for more project-based learning in high schools.

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To Serve You Better

It appears that Sirius will buy out XM and the two satellite radio companies will merge. They were granted licenses in 1997 by the FCC under the condition that neither company could own both licenses, so that there would be competition.
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