Image by superkimbo on Flickr, used under Creative Commons License.

Illustration by Andrew Greenstone

Journal writing has proven to be a powerful and flexible activity that works well for any content area. Whether students are responding to literature, explaining their reasoning, or reflecting on their work, capturing their thinking in written language not only improves their writing and thinking skills but also gives teachers another opportunity to assess students’ progress.

In this week’s webinar, Journaling Across the Curriculum, we will take a close look at how journal writing can become a regular part of classroom work in any content area and at any grade level. We will discuss metacognition which is defined by most as “thinking about thinking” or “knowing about knowing.” The term refers to the ways we reflect on how we know what we know, how we learned it, and how we can apply it to learning new things. Metacognition is essential to becoming an effective, independent learner, and writing about our learning is a powerful metacognitive strategy.

We’ll also look at the advantages of digital journals, in particular how digital journals allow the use of other media as well as text. We will explore some tools for digital journal writing including NoteShare and Pages and discuss the use of  blogs for online journaling. As always, we will invite participants to share their experiences, resources, and ideas.

Please join us this Thursday, December 16 at 3:15 or 7:15 pm. Click on the Webcasts tab above to view our webinar calendar and register for one of Thursday’s sessions.

For too long, access to primary source material has been limited to museums, archives, historical societies as well as attics and basements. Now, with a growing movement to make digital copies of this material available online, access to primary source material is unprecedented for the student researcher. This access obviously brings great benefits, but also challenges: finding the material, storing the copies, and creating high quality digital copies that are accessible to all.

This webinar will discuss and demonstrate how students can create digital copies of primary source material available in their local area, and make the copies available to online users. We will talk about standards for digital copies of material, and work with tools that can be used in this process. In addition, we will look at online collections that are available for use, and discuss ways in which students can use the material found in collections.There will also be a chance to share your own experiences of using primary source material, both with students and from your own work.

This webinar is a precursor to the Maine Council for Social Studies conference on Friday, November 12. For more details on this conference, please visit http://www.memun.org/mcss/

This session will be delivered on Thursday, October 28, at 3:15 PM and again at 7:15 PM. For information and to register, please choose the WebCasts tab at the top of this page.

Thanks to Jim Moulton for the image, showing a letter from Charles Potter from Bowdoin, ME, dated Aug 14, 1835.

We realize that many schools are experiencing a snow day or an early closing today, but our webcast, Citizenship in a Connected Culture will still be held at its originally scheduled time, 3:15 PM.  You can connect from any place where you have a broadband internet connection and a phone, and we hope many of you who are enjoying a snow day will connect from home.

To accommodate anyone who cannot attend today, we have scheduled a repeat session on Tuesday, December 15 at 3:15. If you plan to attend that one, please register here.

As always, these sessions will be recorded and you will be able to access those recordings from our archives page a few days after the webcast.

Snowflake image by Julie Falk licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license.

Organize those ideas!

How can we help our students pull together all the pieces from their brainstorming, research, and other pre-writing activities to begin writing a draft? This is the question we will explore in this week’s webinar, Organizing and Connecting Ideas and Information. We’ll take a close look at NoteShare and its organizing features and investigate two mind-mapping tools on the MLTI image, FreeMind and OmniGraffle. We’ll also look at some free, online tools and discuss other organizing strategies like story boarding with Comic Life. We’ll end with a discussion of synthesis and how we can help students connect and build on others’ ideas to create something new. And, as always, we’ll invite participants to share their experiences, ideas, and resources.

My special guest presenter this week will be Jim Moulton.

Jim Moulton

Many of you are familiar with Jim’s work as a teacher and presenter at numerous state, national, and international conferences. Currently Jim is a Professional Development Specialist for Apple Inc., working right here in Maine with us at MLTI. You may also know Jim as a writer. His articles and blog posts have inspired teachers around the world and he currently has two published books, Talking With Teachers and Computers Can, Computers Can’t… It’s a pleasure to have Jim bring his expertise as a teacher and a writer to our discussion.

Please join us Thursday, November 19 at 3:15 or 7:15 (or both!). Click on the WebCasts tab at the top of this page to find links for registration and directions for joining the webinar.

Organize those ideas! – Illustration by Ann Marie Quirion Hutton