Senator Kennedy

I have had a bunch of things I wanted to post about, but there does not seem to be enough hours in my day (sigh). But, I wanted to remember the senator from my home state of Massachusetts, Senator Ted Kennedy who passed away on Tuesday night.

here is a great pictoral of his life on NPR

and here is what ALA has to say about him

and here is what my favorite team did for him last night

He had been Senator of Massachusetts since before I was born. His family, a large irish catholic family from Massachusetts, just like mine, was our version of royalty. Everyone I know has a Ted story, mine was seeing him in a hotel in Boston where I was waiting for my parents to show up for a college parents weekend, I was upset about something - and his son Teddy actually came over and said something to me - they were having a roast for Ted in the ballroom in the hotel that night.

He was an advocate for those who did not have a voice and no matter what his personal demons were, he was a true American and I for one am glad we had someone like that on our side.

image from the American Library association

My Media Center on Whrrl

My friend Marlynn started using Whrrl on her blog/twitter/facebook to create photo stories and it seemed pretty cool so I thought I would try it out with a photo tour of my media center.

It was easy to use and I could post a link to it on twitter and facebook right after I saved my photo story. You can also send it out as an e-mail. I can see some definite uses in education and one of the best things - it is NOT BLOCKED (at least yet) on my school computer!

hope you enjoy my virtual tour

Powered by Whrrl

1st week wrap up

my desk after a week of craziness!

It's been a week full of.. well.. lets just say it's been a typical 1st week of school full of surprises.

This week I have:

~ Started Monday's morning announcements (which are live on our close circuit tv) with a teleprompter that was out and an audio board that did not work very well - luckily I had 2 5th graders who did an AWESOME "on the fly" job with the announcements without any script at all!

~ Helped the administration put bus tags on ALL of our students backpacks - this involved running around our building and resulted in a big ol blister for me, I need to make a note NOT to wear cute new shoes on the first day next year!

~ Helped LOTS of children on and off buses - including one yesterday that was crying when I got him off the bus in the am and was STILL crying when I put him on the bus in the afternoon (you have to feel bad for THAT teacher!)

~ Worked lunch duty with first graders three days this week (so far, I haven't made any child cry yet, a new record for me and lunch duty!)

~ Finished my media center orientation video and started doing media center orientation for 5th grade classes.

~ Shot and edited a video with our PTA and Principal for Monday's curriculum night

~ Figured out on my own how to work some new equipment our county gave to our media center and gave us no training on - including a visual presenter, a high def. professional dvd recorder and a cd/dvd duplicator. Wrote and had laminated an instruction sheet for teachers on how to use the visual presenter.

~ Had a master's degree student observe me for the day

~ Straightened out my order for the Atlanta Journal newspaper

~ Talked to two 5th grade teachers about collaborating on lessons this year!

and finally....

~ Found out I was nominated by one of my colleagues here for our local schools' Teacher of the Year - now need to fill out more paperwork for the next round of nominations.

I also spent a lot of time after school at my sons football practices this week and managed to get into my first accident, a fender bender in the public library parking lot yesterday, no one was hurt but there was some damage to the other car.

So what a week it has been! I am ready for a weekend full of football games (youth football that is). So Go Eagles (my 8 yr old's team) and Go Hawks (my 13 yr old's team).

Happy New Year!

No, No it's not January 1st, or even Rosh Hashanah, the new SCHOOL year starts tomorrow here in my little piece of Georgia and I always look at the first day of school as a new year, full of possibilities and full of potential. 

Franki at Year of Reading has a great post up about her thoughts/goals for her school library this coming year, it has some great links and great ideas!

This year has started off with me feeling not quite ready and not quite connected. I think the 3-day furlough that our Governor required us to take has something to do with it.  Even though I still came into school on one of the furlough days, our teachers seems to be scrambling and feeling overwhelmed and tired already - and of course those of us that live pay check to pay check are having to figure out how we will live minus the 3 days of pay. There is talk that more furlough days are coming in 2010 and that is making me nervous too.

I do have somethings planned this year that I am excited about - author visits, collaborating with a 5th grade teacher on some great research projects with her students, and a 40th birthday party for the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar (which is the same age as I will turn in October!!) I am looking forward to trying out a Skype author visit (if I can get Skype to work in our school) and also starting a workshop after school for teachers on web 2.0 (this I still have to convince some people on!) I am REALLY looking forward to going to AASL in Charlotte in November with my good friend Tina.  I have never been to an ALA conference so I am very excited about this!

Tomorrow morning I also send my own kids off to a new school year. My oldest is in his last year of middle school (8th grade), my daughter is in her first year of middle school (6th grade) and is quite nervous about it and my youngest is going into 3rd grade at my school.  Having grown up in Massachusetts, it does seem a bit weird to be going back to school in August, when the temps are still in the 90's here! Afternoon bus duty tomorrow is gonna be HOT!

I will leave you with a quote from one of my favorite movies of all time, You've Got Mail  

"Don't you just love fall in New York it makes me want to buy school supplies"- Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail. 

Wordle

Been meaning to try this all summer, finally getting around to playing with it - 

check out my first attempt

trying to print it, but having trouble, wonder if it is one of those things that is not totally compatible with Safari?

Music & Science - Don't worry Be Happy!

I found this great video at Dr. Tim Tyson's blog,  Practical Practice. I love that Bobby McFerrin - the Don't Worry Be Happy guy is at a science conference!

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

I am off to get a little work done at school - I should be sitting in a meeting right now at school, but today and tomorrow are our furlough days. I am lucky that my principal has opened our building, the bad news is, the a/c is off - so I won't be there long!!