// Langwitches Blog

Terry Freedman published his new “Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book”.
It is free for anyone to download as a pdf file. I loaded it on my Kindle and have been enjoying the wonderful project ideas.
Thank you, Terry for all the hard work and thank you to the contributors for their project ideas!

87 projects.
10 further resources.
52 applications.
94 [...]

Through a  Tweet from @HeidiHayesJacob, I found the Ning of the Curriculum 21 book, I recently recommended.
One video uploaded by Heidi of Alan November, a contributor to the book, immediately caught my eye.
He says:
We have to stop spoon feeding kids curriculum tests and homework. They need to be self directed. They need to be life [...]

I am thrilled to be publishing a guest post by Andrea Hernandez, cross posted from EdTechWorkshop Blog on Langwitches.
In an earlier post, The Science of Play, I shared my ideas about the importance of playful learning, the type of learning observed in very young children. In my personal experience as a teacher, I have [...]

I have been blogging for over 4 years now. In my very first bog post (February 20, 2006), I wrote :
This Blog is an experiment. I am fascinated by the possibilities of blogging in the foreign language classroom. I will document what I have learned and hopefully inspire other language teacher to try their own [...]

I want to recommend a book today.
Curriculum 21
Edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Contributing authors: Stephen Wilmarth, Vivien Stewart, Tim Tyson, Frank W. Baker, David Niguidula, Jamie P. Cloud, Alan November, Bill Sheskey, Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick.
I am usually a fast reader, but I have been taking my time with this book. [...]

image licensed under CC by Let Ideas Compete
An Odyssey is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as:
1 : a long wandering or voyage usually marked by many changes of fortune
2 : an intellectual or spiritual wandering or quest
I can’t help but make the association with the above definition of “wandering” ,”changes of fortune” and “quest” with [...]

Are you taking a “risk” as a teacher by “taking precious classroom time” to have students work on a wiki? Does this kind of “project” support the way students learn? Is it a tool that is/can/will help transform teaching?
As I thought of and suggested to my Middle School Math teacher to create a Math wiki [...]

I received a tweet from Michael Kaechele, Technology Teacher at Valleywood Middle School.

What an opportunity!
Michael and I set the Skype calls up for the following week. I had a meeting with our Judaica teachers to get them involved and Brian, the Social Studies teacher from Michigan, shared a Google Doc with the questions his students [...]

Brian’s TRT Blog picked up one of my blog posts from Educon’s session Taking.Play.Seriously. Brian has only a very short response to this:
So, would more play produce more creativity which would result in higher test scores? Hmmmm………
That “Hmmmm” sparked the following comment from me:
That is exactly what I am pondering as well. How can [...]

Taking.Play.Seriously with Brian Smith
Session Wiki
Created with flickr slideshow.

Conversation Description:
Diane Ackerman’s quote, “play is the brain’s favorite way of learning” is oft used to describe the learning that takes place in elementary schools. Despite that belief, a simple visit to any school in the country will reveal a picture that flies in the face of Ackerman’s [...]