Swierzy paints Lester Young

This is the painting I bought on a whim in Vegas at the Venitian a few years ago for $1,200. It's a portrait of jazz musician Lester Young, painted by Polish artist WALDEMAR SWIERZY. It hangs in my livingroom. It is the only piece of art I own that cost more than $25 - except my own, which are priceless.

http://www.poster.com.pl/swierzy.htm

Starting to like Twitter more and more

Even though I'm totally alone on Twitter - just a bare few friends are posting, I'm still inticed by the concept and am thinking of many cool ways to use it with a class -

1. Write a haiku
2. Use three vocab words in context in 140 characters
3. Give concise response to discussion topic
4. Sum up novel and short story themes

Here are some links to Twitter in the classroom ideas

http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/

Twitter FAQ
http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=26

Try some new gadgets

If you haven't tried any of the Blogger Gadgets, you ought to. There are some good ones.

Susan's 60 Birthday Party Slideshow

Whose who was there. We had fun.


This slideshow comes from Picasa, Google's photo sharing service. If you upload pictures to it, you will see an option to "Embed Slideshow" into your Blog or any website you design. Pretty nifty.

Putting together the Touro

Wow. What a challenge this is to put together the best course content I can cull together. Everytime I sit down at my computer I find myself being pulled in 100 directions gathering potential content, trying to sort through it, looking for best content, then trying to find ways to keep me from lecturing too much.

Also, I know we talked a lot about the program not focusing on HOW TO use software, but I don't see any way around at least doing some mini-trainings.

I am eagerly awaiting the Case Studies, curious to see what sort of interesting Word features everyone has found and included. I do think we need to do a Word Workshop on Oct 2 regardless. We will be building an enormous document in our Project Proposal, and it's important that we know certain features like Tables of Contents and document navigation.

I'm also wrestling with the best way for us to internalize the many ISTE and state standards without just memorizing them. That's what I'm doing today, trying to find discussions and activities that will unite our long-term memories with the many lists. Any suggestions?

Welcome to my teacher blog for Touro Masters Program Benicia

Hi, all,

This is my first posting for my class blog. All the students in Touro MA Program class EDU741.B are creating a personal expression blog. We are free to write about anything - hobbies, family, personal reflections, philosophy, marine biology, whatever. We do not need to write about education or technology in this blog, but you are welcome to write about whatever.

What is asked is that you post at least once per meeting of 741.B. Thus you can complete this blog activity with a minimum of 8 postings. We may, however, extend the blogging process into the spring courses. We'll see later how it goes.

Be sure to use all the advanced blog features as the course progresses. Include pictures and movies and other multimedia.