From the Outside Looking In…

The Middle School Concert Series begins TONIGHT! We are looking forward to a great turn out for the three events that we have planned for this week. The kids appreciate your support and are very excited to share some of the projects they have been working on for the past several months.

Today, Mr. Claassen's 8th Grade Strings class gave us a special treat by giving us sneak-peak of what is to come on Wednesday evening. We hope you enjoy the shows...

Monday - 6:30pm - General Music and Choir
Tuesday - 6:30pm - Bands
Wednesday - 6:30pm - Strings

Congratulations to all of our 8th grade students for a fantastic NGO Conference today!

We were impressed with the amount of learning that took place throughout the entire project If you would like to learn more about the NGOs that students created, please visit the 8th Grade Science wiki at http://env-ngo08.wikispaces.com. Students created informative wiki pages and several used iMovie to enhance their presentations during the conference today.

Take a peek for an overview of the day!

Hi guys,

You did a GREAT job on the humanities presentations.  It's now time to get the evidence onto your blogs.  Mr. Cole has the USB of yoru mp4 presentation if you have not put it on the portal yet.  Follow this screencast in class today so that you know how to link embed that video into your blog.

Thanks for learning with me in the land of tech!  I look forward to doing a project like this again with you and making the tech work even better for you!

Ms. DeCardy

Screencast of Directions

Hi art class!

Today I can't be with you because I am at the Apple Distinguised Educator Training in Singapore.  You are working on a fabulous project though and I want to make sure that you can make the most out of Adobe Photoshop CS3.  I've made two screencasts for you to follow along today that show you the ins and the outs for your Artist Chair project in art class.  I've seen the results of this project and they look great!

Good luck and have fun!

Ms. DeCardy

Video 1:

Video 2:

My closest friends are always telling me to take time to reflect.... so here I go. I reflect....

I have been so amazingly busy. I know, I know we are all busy, but this pace is incredible! Being a Technology Integration Specialist has given me the opportunity to have my hand in just about every nook and cranny of the entire school. As I've said before, this position is new at my school and when I took the job I was basically given a job description that said, "Go make tech work and build a program." I was reading the Langwitches blog a couple of days ago and found the most perfect job description for what I do on a daily basis. That job description alone is giving me a framework in which to reflect on the daily occurances involving tech at my school.

Today I hit every single piece of the pie!

• It started off with one to one professional development around the blogging platform for a few of my teachers. Four teachers were blogging in the middle school last year and now we have all but four blogging - not once has administration said that teachers must blog. They blog because they want to do so and it's an excellent way to help our community stay connected!

• I was also a life-long learner after I planned with a 7th grade Humanities teacher. We (I) decided to use Photobooth to record Rome presentations only to discover after the fact that Photobooth flips the image so that all of the writing is backwards. MacForums to the rescue, I discover that you can use Quicktime Pro to flip the video horizontally. I taught the kids how to use Quicktime, taught them how to load it on our school portal and then embed it into their school blog.

• I also taught four 8th grade Science classes where I introduced all of the kids to their 8th grade wiki for their Environment Science NGO Project. Before I got them on the wiki though, I got them onto their school email account through our school portal because we're trying to standardize all logins.

• I then met with two of my elective kids as they podcasted an interview with a teacher about our Movember - Save it or Shave it campaign. My wonderful colleague Simon Power is helping to orchestrate this fabulous event. We then interviewed the lead student actress of the MS Play and podcasted that interview. We hope to have all of this put together for our weekly student podcasts for the middle school. The kids have learned so much about GarageBand and sound boards... it's time for them to fly!

So there friends. I reflected. I actually think this is something more like five blog posts in one, but my days are busy and I'm all over the place. I walk 13,000 steps a day and I team teach in every nook and cranny of the school.

I think I'm starting to make some sense of this!

Image: Technology Integration Facilitator
http://langwitches.org/blog/2008/11/23/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-technology-integration-facilitator/#comment-27692

Congratulations to the entire cast and crew of the MS Play, The Mouse that Roared! Nearly 200 students attended after school on Friday and there was a full audience for a Saturday matinee performance. The Thanksgiving lunch after the show was a special treat for all.

Thank you to Ms. Danka for organizing such a wonderful performance!

Thanks to my colleague Ann Krembs at the American School of Bombay in Mumbai, India, we've found a very convenient citation generator.

Noodlebib Express by NoodleTools has always been a favorite, but now there’s an even better one: Easybib!

• This is a new favorite because of its ease.  The citation generator for MLA is right there–you don’t have to click any further into the site;
• If you find the ISBN number of the book you’re using, it automatically generates a citation for you;
• You can view your works cited page online or download it into a Word document;
• And, signing up is free, so you could continue an ongoing citation page for your separate projects and papers.

Congratulations to Mrs. Kay Saich one of our 8th grade math teachers who is jumping in with both feet when I come to her with ideas.  Today I asked her to record her lesson in math class on her SmartBoard.  We used our fantastic Mac computers to record her voice in GarageBand and then we put video and audio together to create...

Kids will only benefit from having these lessons recorded.  If students are absent, they can still "attend" class for the day.  If students want to review lessons - what did Mrs. Saich say again about the constant of variation - they simply listen to the lesson again.  Students get to "hear" their teachers voice and listen to the identical vocabulary they hear in class.

The kids were excited today - they could see how this is only going to help them improve their math skills at a faster pace.

Good Job Mrs. Saich!!!!

We are thankful to the Pudong PTSA for heading up our annual Giving Tree program for our local community. The Pudong PTSA is working jointly with the Shanghai Community Center to organzie the effort across the Pudong campus.

Each advisory class has been given a few bags that have the information of the child recepients for items that our families are donating for the holiday season. Specificaly, we are sponsoring children from Haichuang School here in Pudong.

Please send items to your child's advisory teacher by November 28.

Together we can fill the Gift Bags with:

• age/gender appropriate gifts
• new, unused items

We have 700 bags to fill this year and with our parent, student, teacher community WE WILL REACH OUR GOAL!

The timelines for this community service is as follows:

November 14th - All bags distributed to classrooms and families during conferences
November 28th - Final day to return bags to SAS
Dec 1 -11th - PTSA and students inventory, shopping for bags that don’t get returned etc.
Dec. 12th - deliver bags to Haichuang School

For more information please contact Angie Gustafson at angiegus2@yahoo.com or your child's advisory teacher for specific information about the children the class is sponsoring.

Thank you for viewing:

SAS joined with Google this year.  Student have access to many google applications through our educational subscription and are genuinely interested in all things Google.  Google is cool.  This week the buzz has been around Google Voice and Video and Chat... watch out Skype - you have company!

Another great feature in Google is Google Maps.  Today via my Twitter network, I learned about the Tea Fire in Santa Barbara.  The community has created a Google Map to reflect: 

• where the fire started
• where the evacuations are occuring
• which schools have been evacuated
• where animal evacuation shelters are located

Here's a community in crisis and they are using

technology effectively to possibly save lives and keep people informed on their home computers, work computers and cell phones.  This inspires me...

So why is it a good thing that SAS and Google are working together to educate children?  Because our kids need to know how to be informed global citizens.

This is timely because just today in 8th grade Humanities we planned out the upcoming Heritage Project with Ms. Muench, Ms. Brown, Mr. Small, Mr. Gilli and Mr. Chambers.  I foresee a great use of Google Maps here for our kids to visually track their life stories and the stories of their ancestors.

I love technology!