Kevin's Blog – July 2007 Archive (9)

I'm in Bonner Springs kansas at a LaQuinta Inn with my family after the MACE MTI conference, watching my kid swimming in the pool outside. My wonderful wife and I are in the air conditioned lobby but our line of sight is perfect. As I watch him scamper and play with friends he just met, I think about Classroom 2.0 and the online teacher community. Was it like this for you, that when you were a kid, you could make the "five minute"friend easily simply by virtue of having a pool in common. It… Continue

I wrote two plays while I was directing theater at Inman Kansas and I'm giving away production rights to them for this school year. They were written for the high school level but have been done in various community theaters. I've added Lulu links below where they can be downloaded for free, so if you're looking to save $$ they might be worth a look. What's my motivation? Well a play really isn't alive unless it's being produced and I love to come and see these on stage whenever I can. One of… Continue

This last week was exhausting, the kind of exhausting that results in sleeping well. I will have to mark this summer as the summer of charter schools and deep thinking in general because I've had the amazing opportunity to work as a facilitator with several of them. The approach and goals of these schools vary but at the end of the day they all seek to educate kids in new, fair and innovative ways. They all want to change their corner of the educational world and so far they have all wanted to… Continue

My wife was doing a research project with her 1-4 students. The idea was to teach kids to use the web for resources and to cite resources. This all started at the beginning of the year. She was doing compare/contrast using dinosaurs as well as descriptive writing. She also used dinosaurs to teach technical reading, having kids study the steps used to get fossils out of the ground. As a culminating activity she allowed me to make fossils with her students. I am so grateful that she allows me… Continue

Years ago I was looking at donated materials given for my summer art camp. Among the items was a large supply of styrofoam of all shapes and sizes. In art we've always been fans of recycling in all it's forms and this camp was no exception. I though how bone-like the pieces looked and it inspired me to create a camp called styro-saurs.

The class started with checking in with the kids who'd signed up and seeing what…

Continue

As I look at the accumulated experiences I created for kids over the years, I always think about the ways we could/should include technology to enhance and extend the experiences and empower imaginations even more. Web 2.0 and the emergence of amazingly powerful tools have created a palette for creative teachers to paint from that is unlike anything that has existed in human history. This to me is an amazing time, but let me take you back to a time of chivalry and knights, of bravery and pride,… Continue

My summer art camps offered me and my kids the chance to live in a culture, to inhabit it's people and the relics of their societies but the best part was that we had fun!

The relic of Viking Voyage was the helmets and once again KFC came to the rescue. We could have fabricated helmets from scratch but something about housing your head in a chicken bucket just felt right!

Add four toilet paper rolls per viking and you've got the makings of horns. A…

Continue

This past Wednesday I was in Ottawa Kansas at the Ottawa Community Arts Council, digging through photo-albums in the basement. The edifice is an old Carnegie library that was taken over by the Ottawa community after the library moved downtown. It happened that I was to meet… Continue

After NECC in Atlanta, I got home and began trying to sort through the miles of great video for my podcast. There were so many amazing conversations with hreat thinkers and educational leaders and my 40 year old mind was quite overwhelmed. The one easy to list highlight of the conference for me was edubloggercon, a great event/day hosted by the creator of this social network Steve Hargadon. Edubloggers from all over came together and talked about the many ways that technology and web 2.0 can… Continue