I will be going back this year too, and I’ve chosen to go to the Norrie Point Environment Center for the Day 2 Field Trip on July 29. The Summer Institute runs from 7/28-7/31/09.

“THV’s annual summer institutes are rare opportunities for K-12 teachers, museum staff, environmental educators, and anyone interested in Hudson Valley arts, environment, and history.  Learn about the region and place-based education with scholars, teachers, scientists, and each other.  Choose from a range of interdisciplinary sessions including hands-on workshops, panel discussions, field trips, and more formal presentations.

This year we focus on two broad themes.  First, how schools and informal learning sites can work together whether or not there is money for field trips.  And, second, using inquiry-based learning to connect schools and informal sites in new ways. ”

Go to their website for registration form and more information.

Traditional semantics is the science of meaning in a language. But on the WWW it’s got new meaning. Perhaps you’ve heard the term Semantic Web and wondered what that’s all about. There’s a non-technical keynote speech from the Breakthrough ‘09 conference, a iMedia marketing summit, by Linguist David Crystal which explains this concept rather well (March 22-25, 2009). You can watch the video here. For a written summary, visit this page.

Although this conference is about marketing, advances in the semantic web could be important for education, too. One of the issues teachers have using the Internet in classrooms center around filtering and blocking so that inappropriate sites and ads aren’t viewable to students.  The main idea about the semantic web is to provide contextually appropriate material (ads) to viewers.

Perhaps this can also be applied to searching, and a coding entry  (XML) can be inserted to prevent inappropriate web pages and ads from appearing in schools more accurately. I also thought it interesting that he has identified about 3,000 knowledge base categories for classifying data.

David Crystal has written many books and articles. An interesting one is txtng the gr8 db8 and his article The joy of txt. Spotlight, November, 16-21addresses concerns about texting and language usage: “The more children text, the more they’re reading and writing.” From his Biography “David Crystal is currently patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and the Association for Language Learning (ALL), president of the UK National Literacy Association, and an honorary vice-president of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, the Institute of Linguists, and the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.” He’s also got a blog at http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/.

Since these blogs are all about education, this should be a better home. It will take some time to  design things and get all the widgets in place, and then incorporate it into my website, but it will come in time.  It was pretty easy to import all my posts from Blogger/Blogspot – but first I had to change my publishing options from FTP to Blogspot. Several images didn’t make it though, so I’ll try and fix that first. And then there’s all those tags that became categories upon importing – those will have to get fixed, too.

If you’re stopping by, hope you find something of interest and value.

We also had a lot of fun visiting the Simple Machine flash interactive at www.edheads.org . For more resources from this workshop, check out the wikipage: http://technoed.wikispaces.com/Science+Journey+Session+3.

 
Want more pictures: Visit my Flicker STEM Grant Photo Set

Thanks so much for coming – look forward to seeing you for session 4….

Lynne Marie Bailey

Once again, I had a great time and can’t wait to see you all again. Many thanks to Steve’s gracious hospitality and the photos.

I started another blog just for the grant. You can find it at bronxdip.edublogs.org. Please click on that link to go over there and find a copy of the resource list and to add your comments.

In my lesson plan I used Trading Card Maker from http://www.bighugelabs.com/ for depicting and describing a character from Animal Farm.

It’s pretty easy to use most of these tools, and a lot of them can easily be used in the classroom at almost any grade level. Stop on over and check out the lesson plans we’ve developed!

Lynne M Bailey
teaching portfolio: http://www.lynnembailey.com/
studio portfolio: http://www.presentsbydesign.com/
http://www.funmasters.biz/ for face painting and body art