Please check out my Donor's Choose project, here . It's called My Mom's Ears and My Dad's Nose. I'm asking for resources on heredity for the 5th graders. I would greatly appreciate any help you can give. Any donations made by November 22 will be matched up to $100.  Use the promo code SPARK during checkout to double your donation. Thanks so much for looking at this project for our school and library!

In searching for electronic portfolio ideas, I found A Media Specialist's Guide to the Internet. Just browse around a bit and you'll see what I mean. Very nice.Very informative.

NT/History Blog: Reinventing School . Bill gives a link to Seth Godin's new manifesto on education. I'd hoped to read some of it before I posted the link, but just glancing through it, I wanted to go ahead and share it.

Thanks to Michael Stevens for sharing his slides for the Hyperlinked Campus . Librarian friends will be especially interested, but so will those in education. While I would have loved to have audio, the slides are thought provoking.

HT to Paul Hamilton for this one. Storybird provides the medium for writing with art provided. The part I really liked - besides the writing was the collaboration possibilities. Woozers! Wonderful potential there. Take the tour , and you'll see what I mean.

OK, one of my professional goals this year has been to add authentic (and objective appropriate) international math connections to my lessons. So here are some of my attempts: Buying fractional parts of villas and jets. World oil reserves - places and oil types. Polygons in geography. We are specifically focusing on other continents. Comparison of square mileage of USA states to European countries. Water conservation efforts world wide and why they are important. Comparison of gas prices gallons here to liter in Canada. Conversion of real-time temperatures in Australia (I know a guy there) to F. Conversion of mountain heights from Km to Mi. This is just a few of the things I've broached with the kids. It's late and I just can't come up with an exhaustive list right now. It's been thought provoking experience for them and has stretched me. So why do we need to have these conversations? When asked how a villa or jet could have fractional pieces. Every class decided it was...

And it went very well actually. Google Forms. Some of the kids had a hard time with the submit button. They didn't intuitively know to click it when they were done. I'll admit that seems a bit odd to me, but . . . Some things I learned along the way: I had to add a place for the students to put their name in at the top. I should have had a first name and a last name box for sorting on the spreadsheet. I should have also had a box for them to indicate their class. Easily fixable on the spreadsheet, but I could have taken care of it up front. I had 10 multiple choice question with the last one being a free response. s The google spreadsheet is a little awkward to deal with, but it easily downloads to excel which is easier. My questions were all on the top row. Some were pretty complex, so they took up a lot of room. I cut those and put them on the second page of the spreadsheet. I made the key on the first row of the spreadsheet. This helped with grading. I added a ...

Steve Hargadon will interview Karen Hume this week: Date : Thursday, February 3, 2011 Time : 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am GMT (next day-- international times here ) Duration : 1 hour Location : In Elluminate. Log in at  http://tr.im/futureofed . The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit  http://www.elluminate.com/support . Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page. Event and Recording Page :   http://www.learncentral.org/event/134859 Karen Hume has written 6 professional development books for teachers. Her latest publication is  Tuned Out: Engaging the 21st Century Learner (Pearson Canada, 2010) . Her previous best-sellers include  Start Where They Are , and Evidence to Action . Karen’s writing, workshop facilitation, and keynote addresses revolve around differentiated instruction, which she sees as an organizi...