pafa.net

I sent out a plea for help today to my school library buddies, asking for some curriculum links for an upcoming workshop. Mary Ratzer, a former School Library Media Specialist, now a consultant (Learning Curve Associates) sent me a wonderful list of Inquiry Lesson Plan Sites that she uses in her workshops.

“We use these sites in a workshop called Growing Into Inquiry where we transform flat, task oriented, fact detecting research tasks into inquiry process gold. It is our strategy to thereby implement the Information Inquiry Curriculum that 50 SLMS wrote with Linda Fox and me in 2006.”

I’ve had the pleasure of attending presentations given by Mary and am in awe of her knowledge, enthusiasm and ability to engage an audience. I’ve also co-presented some workshops with her and learned so many new things in the process.

Don’t pass up a chance to attend a presentation or workshop by her! 

Earlier tonight I received a note about a live webcast discussing the PBS multimedia Election 2008 curriculum and the Web 2.0 tools and resources that are part of the curriculum. Wow, I’m so glad I clicked through to it, even though I got there a bit late.

The material they’ve created is just terrific!  Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Engagement will help you “discover the power of social media while promoting your students’ civic engagement.” This is a treasure trove of ideas, resources, interactive tools, lesson plans and more - all showing the enormous power and value of 2.0 tools. And what better context than this presidential election.

Use these resources to show the value of these tools and why we need to open our classrooms to them.

In addition to this terrific content, it was really interesting to see Elluminate in action.  (more…)

2 1/2 years ago, Wikispaces committed to giving away 100,000 ad-free, private, unlimited use wikis to K-12 educators. They reached that number this weekend. And are ready to start on the next 250,000! Wow.

250,000 More K-12 Wikis Like the first 100,000, all of our K-12 wikis feature all the benefits of our Plus service:

• full privacy, only the people you allow in can see your wiki
• no advertising, your online classroom will remain ad-free
• unlimited use, as many users, pages, edits, and files, as you like, no limits
• a customizable look and feel, so you can make it feel like home

Share Your Wikispaces in Education Story: Have a great story about how you’ve used Wikispaces? Share it!

This looks really interesting. Wish I could attend.

The second annual Games in Education Symposium, free to middle and high school teachers, is scheduled for Tuesday & Wednesday, August 19-20th and will take place at the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium.

Seems that PBwiki is giving away premium accounts to librarians and educators. Sign up now at the PBwiki Back to School Challenge

Announcing a new way to make PBwiki a part of your classroom this year with:

* A FREE Premium PBwiki ($250 value)
* Tools to help spread the word
* Support for using 21st century collaboration tools in your classroom!

It’s free to join. Sign up to hear about the launch before anyone else.

From Jan Tunison at Scotia Glenville High School (NY):

Scotia-Glenville BC Calculus Wiki

Our BC calc students created a wiki for future classes to use. The students did a great job, especially with adding math content and the editing of math symbols, etc. The awesome teacher of this class allowed her students the freedom to create content, drive the vision of the wiki, and solve problems, and her students rose to the occasion. The student who actually created the backbone for the wiki is an incredible student.

This is an an impressive project! Well done!