Well, it has almost been a year since I really was doing some serious posting! Yikes!  I found the coolest thing I am going to try with my Digital Storytelling students.  This was born out of the fact that I started the year with NO computers. Zero!  That kind of takes a bite out of the digital part of digital storytelling!

We are three weeks in to the new year and I still don't have the new laptops (despite some very hard work and long hours put in by our tech department).  So, we storyboarded commercials (which we can't make yet), and planned and started on the filming of short horror story scenarios.  I have the help (thankfully) of a former student, Bryon, who is a whiz at film and has the answers to the questions I have been asking for the past 6 years! Yay!

So, this week we made zoetropes.  Not bad, really.  While searching for a pattern or demo or something, I ran across the amazing video posted above.  Wow!  In fact, Walt Noon, the person who made the video, has been quite helpful and willing to answer my questions.  So now I am on a quest to build the high tech zoetrope.  I figure I can give the students a circular base to design on, and we can try them all out one at a time and film them.  This could be really cool!

Now I just have to find a way to be amazing a little while longer while we get our new computers and I build the zoetrope.  Gotta say, I can pull that off every once in a while, but being amazing two days in a row...ahhhh.   Picture deer in the headlights...

I'll update my blog as we go along, so that anyone following will be able to see how it goes!

Okay, this was just too funny. I discovered a site called LiveBinder, which I think is going to solve my problem of iGoogle going away and my Box of Links not working. In fact, it will be a great tool for organizing different content areas, as well as for saving cool stuff I find on the Internet. (No, the book is not real, but it was fun to play with the app).

 One of the links within the tutorials for this site took me to: Page Plugins

I used this site to created the pseudo book cover posted here. 



The site lets you make all sorts of fun things to post on a blog or social network page - for free.  Free is good.  It is really easy, too.  Once you create your banner or whatever, you just copy the embed code onto your site, and voila!

Image taken from Amazon.com

On a more practical note, I found a book on Amazon that I think is really great. It is callde Making Thinking Visible. Co-authored by educators Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison, the book shares practical routines that can be used across grade levels to help students think more deeply about the subjects they encounter in class. It comes with a DVD demonstrating the use of these routines in real classrooms across a variety of ages and subjects. I think this book is well worth looking into. It is very practical - which is my favorite thing! The authors don't just pontificate about the benefits of higher level thinking. They show you. The book retails for $29.95.

Updated ACES Presentation for Spring of 21012

After a year of developing the ACES program, we will be visiting our own high school to share with the staff. This will be a great opportunity for us to clarify what it is we are doing over in our building.

All-in-all it has been a successful year. Challenging, yes. Exhausting, yes. But we really laid a good foundation for next year and, I think, proved that there is enough interest to support investing resources into growing and developing the program next year.