Hi - I read your post about creating wikis with your kids. My ultimate application in this case is for our business training manual, but I was hoping you could point me at the tools you used to teach your kids to create a wiki from scratch - even though elementary school kids are probably far more technologically advanced! Thanks for any help!

Thank you so much - this sounds like just what I'm looking for - sort of a teach-your-granny-to-wiki level thing! I will definitely check out your links.

Thanks, Ann - I really appreciate the help. Now to find the time to work with it all!

Just stopped by to say hi - how is school going this year?

Actually that would work perfectly. Thank you for the quick response. If you want to e-mail it to joe.sherwood@live.com I would appreciate it very much. I will be sure to let you know how it goes as well.

I don't know why it did not work?
joe.sherwood@live.com

If that one does not work then try this one:
josher04@wsc.edu

Wow - I've been reading through your blog and there are so many things that I want to try with my classes next year. I love the "Make Way for Ducklings" idea and I had wondered about the Monster Project & Panwapa.

Thanks for the inspiration!

I did see your Wiki and have that in my list of resources too. I use KidPix for a lot of different things - some major ones we did this year were:
1) A unit on art in the style of (or inspired by) various famous artists. Grades K-3 used KidPix exclusively while Grades 4 & up had the choice of using KidPix, Paint or PhotoFiltre.

Here's a slide show of the pictures inspired by Van Gogh's "Starry Night":
2) Grades 5 & 6 created avatars for use on Voicethread
3) Grades K-2 drew pictures for Earth Day based on "The Lorax"

Here's a video created with our Lorax pictures:

Hello,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this virtual Ning network is no exception. My name is Ellen Chisa. I am a 20 year old student from Olin College of Engineering (near Boston). I am a part of a group of six Olin students who are taking a year off to pursue our interests in education, entrepreneurship, design and technology, bringing us to the logical project of a business that designs collaborative software for schools! I found you in a search for "middle school", and since our project is specific to middle schools, I thought you might be interested. Our project is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

We are working under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media and tools: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum, and internet-based software. We hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. More importantly, and unlike many of our competitors, our software will empower teachers to better integrate higher level thinking skills, individualized learning, goal setting, reflection, and effective feedback and evaluation. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2008, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools and individual teachers will want to use to improve their students' learning in and out of the classroom.

Our team is currently trying to win an idea competition on Ideablob.com You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975. We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start. Note that winning this contest will raise $10,000, a large and useful sum of money for a web-based company running on “sweat equity” and minimal costs.

Feel free to email me back, post on my profile, check out alightlearning.com, or do anything you like!

Thanks,
Ellen Chisa
ellen.chisa@students.olin.edu