Mr Hammerlund

I am currently taking a continuing education course and the first assignment is to make a magazine cover about what we learned using what makes a good magazine cover. I love the idea of making a magazine cover to synthesize and summarize ideas in a creative way. Assessing students by having them make a magazine cover seems like an extension of Project Zero's  the headlines thinking routine .

I read the story, Ganesha and the Curse on the Moon , for my students and they really liked it. So, I started thinking about plenary activities for them to do and decided we would act out the book as a play. Right away I could see the vocabulary would be a challenge and there would need to be a lot of time to practice lines. I also wanted a way to share their performance more than once. I made the book into a script and printed out enough copies for all the students. Each student was able to choose a part. They could be a reader, someone who reads the lines, an actor, someone who controls the puppets, or a narrator. After they chose their parts, I highlighted it for them so it was easier to read. I started by trying to record the audio separately and was going to put the audio together with the video. iMovie doesn't allow you to tag, or rename clips. So the audio and the video got jumbled and were difficult to put together. The actors did not know when to do what bec...

When I first became a technology coach, I wanted to be able to share the interesting ideas I found on Twitter. I used several different services that allowed me to save Tweets or Posts, but they all lacked the ability to tag posts. Searching for posts is great if you know what you are looking for, but I wanted to find a service that would also allow me to tag posts. In my research to find the right tool, I stumbled on an applet on ifttt.com that saves Twitter posts that you favorite on Twitter, to a Blogger blog. ifttt.com stands for if this then that and is a site that allows you to create workflows between apps. This was great because, with a blog, you can search the entire site as well as tag posts. (I suppose there is one for Wordpress too, but I prefer Blogger.) Two ways to search 1. Head over to ifttt.com to get started Sign up for an account if you don't have one. You will also need to connect your Blogger account and your Twitter account so iftt...