// Langwitches Blog

How is geography being taught in your school? Is it a weekly time block designated under the umbrella of Social Studies in Elementary School? Is it a semester or one year required credit course in High School? Geography is a separate subject. Really? Heidi Hayes Jacobs says (p. 36) in her Curriculum 21. (ASCD, 2010) [...]

After 14 months of manually managing the rapidly growing  participants/educators to the Around the World with 80 Schools project (and adding their locations to a Google Map), I have decided to migrate and build a community for participants on the Around the World with 80 Schools Ning. Here is some info about the project and [...]

The title of this post “Use Experience to Reach Others” is from a blog post one of our 7th grade (Jewish) students wrote after skyping with (Muslim) students from Minnesota. (Thanks Micah!) Last month, out Middle School students became the Experts as they were talking bout Judaism to 7th grade classes from Michigan, who were [...]

Digital Storytelling with Prezi « Trails Optional I’ve been working with my grade 6 class on using Prezi. They love it! The first class we played with features, inserting pictures, and just getting used to the controls. Then I had them plan out stories making webs of characters, settings, and plot details (tags: prezi digital_storytelling) [...]

Wifitti looks like an interesting tool for the classroom, but also for presenations and conferences. You can add up to 5 tags to be pulled in to your Wifitti wall from Twitter and Flickr. Contributors can text messages to the wall or enter them on the web. Wiffiti publishes real time messages to screens in [...]

Tech Transformation: A Window to the World – Grade 2s connect worldwide (part 2) what was really exciting about this blog post, was seeing our school and the view from our classroom, projected up onto the wall in the classroom in Florida – we had lifted the laptop onto the windowsill to show the students [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Tech Transformation: Whatever the Weather – Grade 2s connect worldwide I started with the Around the World with 80 Schools project set up by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano (Langwitches blog), and then set about connecting with schools in very different parts of the world. We wanted some southern hemisphere schools – so that the students would [...]

I am enjoying my Kindle tremendously. I am also trying ot be aware how the Kindle is changing (or not) my use, reading, storing, buying habits and general attitude towards books. My reading habit is not necessarily linear and sequential, at least not for non-fiction books.  I do not read one book straight through. I [...]