Blogs

This site is awesome. I will be sure to mention it tomorrow night at our SLST meeting at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca. If you are in the area, you are invited to come!

You are cordially invited to explore the July-December issue of MidLink Magazine http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink the award-winning magazine for students ages 8 - 18. If you're lookingfor ideas for your upcoming year, you’ve come to the right place! Please email the teacher/editors of the projects below you would like to participate in with your students! Youand your students are sure to get inspired by the projects created byMidLink Magazine's teacher-editors:

1. Periodic Table of Podcasts: Have your students add their own scientific podcast to the growing body of information found in thisexciting project!

2. Find a Story… Map a Story… Tell a Story: Use emerging digital mapping tools to explore the connection between story, place andcommunity.

3. Science Through the Camera Lens: Study the science found in pictures and then create a multimedia project

4. Tell Me a Story: Learn how to encourage children to accept and celebrate their differences, using digital storytelling

See detailed descriptions below or visit MidLink Magazine at: http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink/

1. Periodic Table of Podcasts

We invite students from any school to participate in the development of the "Periodic Table of Podcasts". To participate, instructions areprovided within this website. There are very easy ways to create audiofiles in the classroom even if you have only a few computers by usingInternet resources such as Podomatic or Odeo. Audio files could behosted on your school's server, various Internet resources, or othermeans. Don't let the technology get in the way- for help and advisecontact the webmaster of this site. All we need is the URL (link) toyour students' audio files, and we can add them to the Periodic Tableof Podcasts! If you wish to collaborate regarding your podcast project,e-mail Joselyn Todd, Ph. D.

Project URL: http://tinyurl.com/2ornnn

Contact Teacher Editor, Dr. Joselyn J. Todd, Cary Academy, Cary, NC

2. Find a Story… Map a Story… Tell a Story

This Place-based Stortelling Project invites students to choose a story that matters to them and using an online mapping tool likeCommunity Walk, Wayfaring or Google Maps, create a StoryMap that willplace their stories within a geographical context. Using one of thesedigital mapping tools, students will locate a geographical map fromtheir story location, and add images, audio and text memories to theplace markers found on the mapping tool. This project will helpstudents recover lost stories and save and share them so other canenjoy and learn from them. You are invited to browse through theproject resources and projects example on this web site and plan tohave your classroom participate:

Project URL: http://www.rebooting.ca/place/

Project Coordinator: Brenda Dyck, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Red Deer College (Middle Years’ Program), Red Deer,Alberta

3. Science Through the Camera Lens

Have you ever seen a view of nature or engineering and wondered about the "awesomeness" of it? Did you take a picture of it so youcould capture it forever? Florida State University School Sciencestudents did just that. They took pictures with a digital camera or acamera phone. Students delivered them to their science teacher viaemail or on a flash drive. Students studied the science in the picturesthen created their multimedia project. Here are their stories.....

Project URL: http://www.fsus.fsu.edu/mcquone/scicam/scicam.html

Teacher Editor, Cathy McQuone, Earth/Space Science Instructor, Florida State University Schools, Tallahassee, Florida

4. Tell Me a Story

Tell Me a Story is a project in which students were asked to contemplate the following essential questions:

How does culture shape the way we see ourselves, others, and the world? How does my culture shape me? Why is it important to understandculture? The purpose of this project is to encourage children to acceptand celebrate their differences. We want to help all children develop apositive self-concept and feel proud of whom they are. If this positivesense of self and others is allowed to flourish, today's children willbecome adults who accept and affirm differences, identify unfairsituations, and strive to eliminate racism of any sort.

Grade levels: K-8

Project URL: http://tinyurl.com/2qnzgr

Teacher Editor: Karen Kliegman, Library Media/Educational Technology Specialist, Searingtown School, Albertson, Adjunct Professor, Long Island University, New York kkliegman@herricks.org

Brenda Dyck, BEd, MET

Senior Editor: MidLink Magazine: http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink/

Sessional Instructor, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Red Deer College MiddleYears’ Program, Red Deer, Alberta, Canada

E-mail: dyckba@shaw.ca

By Guest Blogger Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Still Summer

There are these phrases that spring from the pens of pundits and spread outward through the culture.

"Yuppie" (the derivation of which scarcely anyone considers anymore, but which was supposed coined by erstwhile essayist Bob Greene to mean Young Upwardly Mobile Person) is a good example. There are scads of other such phrases: Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were called "Teflon presidents," in that it seemed they go do wrong and have the wrong slip off them as easily as a fried egg slides off Teflon..(our current president must be the Saran Wrap president because he never even gets the egg on him in the first place). "Gaydar" was created long ago to describe the ability to sense someone's homosexual orientation.

"Chick lit" once meant a certain kind of writing.

It was, of course, by a woman. And it was originally used to describe a story based on topics that, while important, might not change the world -- from dating to Botox to minor infidelity to dating to the importance of girlfriends in crises involving dating to the married-man-dilemma to dating to body angst to dating. Reading "chick lit" ( some of which is very skillfully written indeed) one was a sort of guilty pleasure, accepted as such and described as such.

Now this parasol has grown larger, to the size of a pop-up tent that is used to cover a much wider slice of writing.

Now, the term chick lit often is used to describe anything written by a chick -- that is, by a woman. It doesn't matter what the story is. It can be a narrative of any description, from historical fiction to domestic drama to psychological suspense. I suppose the exceptions are FBI and police procedurals and medical thrillers. The exception is, it seems, if the writer is not a European American. If she is writing after living under the burka or comes from a war-torn nation or is an African lawyer writing about a topic as harrowing as genital mutilation, no critic will call what she writes "chick lit." Such subjects are so serious they might well have been written by actual men.

I use the example of Tom Perrotta's novel 'Little Children' for several reasons -- among them that it recently was made into a feature film.

Tom Perrotta wrote a very good and wry and funny and poignant book about suburban life, about a stay-home dad and various mothers both over-ambitious and predatory. Critics wrote, "What is Tom Perrotta but an American Chekhov, whose characters even at their most ridiculous seem blessed and ennobled by a luminous human aura?" and ""Suburban comedies don't come any sharper."

But they do; and women write them.

When women write them, readers and analysts don't marvel at the writer's ability to "get inside" the mores and behaviors and (ahem) "feelings" of suburbia any more than they did when John Updike started doing this a long time ago.

Women are supposed to be able to do that.

When women write them, there is an absence of congratulatory acclaim, of the kind Perrotta enjoyed -- although he is a wonderful and versatile writer.

When men write such books, they never are called "chick lit," although usually the main difference is that the word "feel" is never used or even described and the affect in a book written by any man is flatter (there is, therefore, as in the Hemingway fallacy, a greater presumption of genius).

Now, I don't think of myself as a chick who writes chick lit, although I am undeniably a chick. Actually, I probably am not a chick, since I think of this term as reserved for people who might also be called "babes," people who are younger than I and wondering what to wear clubbing or to the winter formal. But I'm a woman and a writer of sorts and so I hear this term often, directed at my work.

I write stories; and many of the stories have women in them. They are (therefore) chick-chick lit...by a chick about chicks. But they are considered chick lit even when some of the main characters are men -- partially, I think, because these men may have feelings, even if they don't express them as a woman would. For example, if they were to lose their wives and children in a great fire, they would not react simply by staring a the horizon or scrubbing at a spot of dust on one of their shoes (which is what I mean about that "flat" thing, the sure sign of genius, as is the refusal to use quotation marks). If always BY a chick and FEATURING at least one chick, my books are not always for chicks (at least not entirely); although chicks (women) purchase more than 80% of all books, presumably while men are staring at the horizon, wondering why they never got to go to sea or war (not my idea, but Dr. Johnson's).

In any case, although I would like to say that this has to stop, it's not going to because it's a convenient way for anything written by a women to be wadded up inside an apron and dismissed -- by observers who are men and also, regrettably, other women. Nathaniel Hawthorne came right out and said that he considered women writers (among them Charlotte Bronte) annoying scribblers who oughtn't to be allowed to persevere. We have come a long way since then.

We aren't as honest.

Jackie's first YA novel, 'Now You See Her' -- the tale of a driven young actress who fakes her own abduction - is now on sale. 'Still Summer,' the suspenseful story of four women stranded at sea, appears in hardcover in August, 2007, as well as the new form paperback of 'Cage of Stars.'

To my wonderful colleagues who might wander through this morning, it might look like I'm sitting on my rear and not doing anything. The truth is, I'm trying to rejuvenate myself for the last stretch until school is out and also take notes on ideas for next year. I'm starting graduate school again this summer (this time for a CAS in Digital Libraries) and know that even if I intend to plan this summer and come up with some snazzy ideas, I won't. I'm taking two classes this summer, then two in the Fall and again in the Spring until I'm through. We'll see where I go in my career after that, but until then, I really do want to make an impact with students here and collaborate more than I've been able to in the past.

The problem here is that teachers feel so much pressure from their pacing guides that they don't feel comfortable making them their own. I've spoken with teachers who say there are ways to still put yourself in your lesson plans and am fortunate enough to be working with one now. This English teacher and I both attended NCaect in March and came back with so many ideas and the motivation needed to do some truly awesome things with her students. Of course, both of us were yearbook advisors this year and now we're preparing for prom next week, so innovation sometimes tends to take a back seat... maybe that's why I need today to refuel. Until two minutes ago, I was lamenting not being able to put all of my ideas in one place, but then I saw that there's a blog on here and thought that this just might be the answer for me! We'll see... I started Midwood Innovators (http://mwdinnovators.blogspot.com) after the conference, but as Blogger is blocked here at school and the last thing I want to do sometimes when I go home is hop online, it's in a lull.

:)