Diane Moline's Page

Hi Diane. I was wondering if you have any high school students who would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

Hi Ms. Moline,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this classroom20 network is no exception. My name is Marco Morales; I am a 20 year old college student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin College students (we're in Needham,MA, and engineering students) who has taken a year off to work on an education related project. I found you when I searched for middle schools on classroom20, 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:

Under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum and other web tools, 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. 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 want to pilot and use at their schools, while allowing individual teachers to implement this tool in their own classroom.

Our project, titled Alight Learning, 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 many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start.

Feel free to email me back, check out alightlearning.com, anything you like!

Thanks,

Marco Morales
marcotuts@gmail.com

feel free to email me at gopisu@gmail.com I 'm a school teacher and run an elementary school here in a rural area of Nepal, land of Mt. Everest.

Hi, I am here with Karen Ditzler. I am Marjorie Hessler, the Special Interest teacher. I would love to collaborate with you! I read through your message and saw that you like to do interactive polls. What a great idea! I was thinking about doing a HUGE poll on the presidential candidates. What do you think? I am up for any ideas that you may have. I love using technology and working with Karen! Please email me anytime at mhessler@wssd.k12.pa.us
Hope to hear from you soon!

Margie Hessler

ABSOLUTLEY! I work with a Special Interest Teacher who loves to do technology projects. I'm sure we could work something out. Let me think about the possibilities and talk with the teacher. Are you able to videoconference, video skype or video chat from school? I know the kids love to have a virtual meeting with the each other.

Good morning, Diane
It is a pleasure to meet you. I am most impressed with the things you are doing and I look forward to reading more of your blog. We must have our students share some work. I will email you shortly with more of my thoughts and ideas. This will an exciting, meaningful experience for our kids.
Thank you!

Feel free to use my class web site. I will be doing a new blog this year as I've changed schools and positions (I teach in the computer lab now). I have one blog for 6th and one for 5th ready to go. I'll probably add on 3rd and 4th grade ones as the year progresses. Thanks for the compliments!

My curriculum has changed a lot over the years. I used to use a lot a "store bought" materials but in the last 7-8 years I've written all the material from scratch. I'm blessed to be in a team teaching situation with a young and enthusiastic partner. We are starting the year with a research-science unit called Pirates and Shipwrecks (grades 5-6). She is writing the curriculum for the first part of the unit and it will contain info on pirates, shipwrecks and emphasis on water science. Science is a strength of hers, not me! We will of course participate in Talk Like A Pirate Day Sept 19. When she is finnished doing whatever she is going to do I'm going to do a study of the Titanic. You may have read about it on my website http://connections.smsd.org/titanic.

One of the things I love is attaching primary sources to the curriculum so the Titanic study will focus on the database of passengers and crew and answering so big questions.

We are going to read a novel along with this study. We wanted to read a classic, Treasure Island, but neither of us can slog our way through it so we may go with Peter Pan, Airborn by Kenneth Oppel, or Peter and the Star Catchers. We will do an online book discussion.

I teach the 4th graders alone (each grade comes once a week for the day). I'm thinking about using an old video series called Voyage of the Mimi (Ben Affleck is in it at age 10) to study the Maya Indians of Mexico. We may to do wiki (they haven't done one yet) to gather our information. Lends itself to great photos, etc even though it's not"new" material. I'm toying with reading a book called Valley of Secrets--haven't read it yet but a perfect fit with the rainforest study.

So that is what we have planned so far. There is a webquest on my website (bottom right) that we did last year called "So You're Gifted, Now What?" It was fun and the kids enjoyed it. You can see it at http://adifferentplace.org

Keep in touch and maybe we can find something to do together--a book study would be easy to set up as a starter. Later, N.

Do you have self contained classes? Bet that's fun.

Sure, we can be friends and maybe even come up with some great collaboration with our kids. One of the issues I have with all this Web 2.0 stuff is that kids blog with someone sitting right next to them! I'm trying to broaden our horizons. Have a good last few days--I have 3 left!! N.