Links of the Month: May

This month, Kacey highlights Keith Schoch’s blog, Teach with Picture Books, and shares interviews with John Merrow, Kevin Kelly, and Sir Ken Robinson. Cheridy focuses on bookmapping  and a Seedling’s podcast that in part explores the topic of the balance between banning technology and integrating it.  Our links include sites that we see potential in or that have worked for us in our own classes. 

PODCAST PICKS

Kacey’s picks:

John Merrow:  Here is Harvard Graduate School of Education EdCast interview with John Merrow.  John discusses how the teaching career has changed over his time of reporting on education. He also discusses his new book, The Influence of Teachers. More Harvard EdCast interviews can be found here.

The Future of Education:  Steve Hargadon conducted two great interviews for his current interview series called The Future of Education.  One was with Kevin Kelly and the other was with Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken Robinson talks about promoting creativity in schools and organizations and about his revised book, Out or Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. In our previous posts Brain Food and Changing Education Paradigms: Sir Ken Robinson, you can read more about Kevin Kelly and his new book What Technology Wants and link to the amazing RSA Animate  video with Sir Ken Robinson.

Cheridy’s picks: 

Bookmapping:  My first podcast explores bookmapping.  It's a short 15 min ISTE Podcast interview with authors Terence Cavanaugh and Jerome Burg about their book Lit Trips and Beyond.  Listening to this podcast gave me the push to explore a bookmapping site that I’ve been interested in for awhile, Google Lit Trips.  Check it out!  There are some great examples for K-higher ed.  I’ve highlighted some of my favorite books:  K-5 Flotsam, 6-8 The Slave Dancer, and 9-12 The Grapes of Wrath. Here’s more information on bookmapping by the American Association of School Librarians.

Ban or Integrate?: I also enjoyed listening to this Seedlings podcast 113 with guest Rebecca Peterson.  It includes an interesting conversation about schools’ attempts to ban laptops, smartphones, and other electronics.  The conversation carries into thinking of ways we can use these as tools to engage our students rather than banning them. There is also discussion of the need to be aware that as our students face change due to new technologies, this creates the necessity for some emerging pedagogy to meet their needs.  In addition, there is some practical discussion of things to consider when using iPads in the classroom.

LINK PICKS

Kacey’s picks:  Teach with Picture Books and Teaching That Sticks are blogs by Keith Schoch, an educator in New Jersey. I enjoyed Keith’s post, Make Language an Adventure: Learning Grammar with Picture Books.  Be sure to check out Keith’s links to blogs he reads.

A picture book I was reminded of after viewing Keith’s blog is a book recommended at the Oregon Reading Association Convention by children’s author George Shannon. The book, Three By The Sea by Edward Marshall, is an easy reader but has a wonderful lesson on writing a good story. Three friends at the beach each tell a story. Each one becomes more detailed, and the final story by Lolly has lots of details and is actually a bit scary. It is fun having students try their hand at “writing like Lolly!”  I’ll be adding this to the list for a beginning lesson on writing next year.

Cheridy’s picks:  ClassTools.net.  If some creativity is employed and it is selectively used, this site has potential to add some simple technology spice to the class.  Some of their links that I have used are fakebook, random name picker,  countdown timer, and some of the graphic organizers such as the venn diagram and the hamburger diagram. 

The Seedlings Geeks of the Week inspired me.  I want to explore Storify.  Perhaps this will be a future post.  I used this TED Talk by Eric Whitacre in one of my classes.  It will be a part of a future post.  

Happy listening and exploring!