Moneysavingmom.com passed along a flier from Starbucks with the following information (some people are reporting that it starts 9/8 in their area):

Kick off the new school year at Starbucks. Stop by each Monday now through September 29 and receive a tall cup of Pike Place Roast ™, on us. Just present a valid K-12 teaching credential and the coffee’s our treat. It’s a little recognition for everything you do.

I am unsure whether this is a nationwide deal or not. Does anyone know? From the flier she sent, it appeared it was valid at all freestanding Starbucks throughout the country. Let us know if you find out!

This project appears on the National WritingProject’s website.

For high school teachers and mentors who would like to capitalize on young people’s interest in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Google and the National Writing Project have teamed up to create Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future.

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is an online writing and publishing project that invites young people to write about the issues and concerns they would want the next president to address and, with the support of their teachers, to publish their writing for a national audience.

During the presidential campaign, U.S. high school teachers and mentors guide students through the process of writing a persuasive letter or essay to the presidential candidates. Students’ work should encourage the candidates to give attention to issues and concerns that students feel are central to their future. Topics are chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests, and teachers will be able to support student writing and publishing in a way that most directly fits their local curricula and educational goals.

Through the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website (which launches in mid-September) and Google Docs , a free online writing tool, participating teachers can work with students to publish their work online for their peers, teachers, and parents, and for the public. And who knows, the future president may read their letters too.

Register Now!

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is open to U.S. teachers and mentors working with students ages 13–18. The project requires parent/guardian permission (PDF) for students to publish their work on the Web and requires that students and teachers have Internet connectivity and use or create a free Google account.

Google accounts allow teachers and students to use Google Docs to compose, collaborate, edit, and share writing through Internet-accessible documents. The Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website provides a secure way for teachers to publish students’ publication-ready writing to a high-profile website intended to feature strong, well-reasoned, and persuasive writing by young people.

Interested teachers should read How to Participate and then register here by September 8. Please note, in order to register for this project, you must first have an account on NWPi.

Note: When you register for this project, you will be automatically signed up for an NWP discussion list specifically designed for this project. By default, messages to the discussion list will be sent to you via email. For more information about our discussion lists, and to change the email settings for a discussion, please visit our subscriptions page.

BEFORE YOU READ THIS:

If you do not know what a digital pen is, you can simply scroll down to the bullet points below (or click HERE to read about the Logitech Digital Pen). It writes just like a real pen, but it stores what you wrote so you can plug the pen into your computer  and upload it to a document.

MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL

I have recently considered investing in a new piece of technology that would help with digital portfolios.  If you wanted to keep a catalog of a students’ mistakes, but did not want to double your workload, you could purchase one of these pens.  Once you finish writing in the margins you could save that data to add it to your digital portfolio (a word document for that student).

 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

As you grade assessments that require a progression of improvement (i.e. spelling tests, etc.), you can make corrections in the margins that will later be uploaded to your computer from the pen.

IEP/SPECIAL ED. SUGGESTIONS:

You could also have students who have IEPs get notes from other students.  I guess this would be an expensive version of the carbon copy paper.

TIP (though I haven’t used one yet): I guess you would have to keep a pad  next to your stack of papers to write to jot down the name of each student as you begin grading their papers.  The reason is because when you upload the list of notations made by your digital pen, you wouldn’t know where one students paper began and another ended.  By reaching over and jotting down the name of the student each time (and drawing a line across the page, perhaps, you would be telling the pen to do the same on the document when you upload the data.

MORE INFO

For more information about this pen (there are many different versions out there), read the information below:

• What is it? You write with the pen in the notebook.  The pen has ink.  The notebook is real paper.  What’s new?  The pen uses an optical sensor to store everything you write.  Even once the pen is separated from the paper, it stores the pages you have written.  When you are ready to upload, you place the pen in it’s USB-linked cradle and it uploads in one click of the mouse.  Now everything that was written down is on your computer.
• Cost?  Retail is $149.95 for a pen and notebook.  Of course, you can find it for a little cheaper if you look around on the Internet.  You can get several sizes of notebooks.  I was able to purchase six standard-paper sized notebooks for under $25 after some digging.
• Technical Requirements?  Pen, cradle, notebook, io software.  This all comes packaged together.  To my knowledge, this product does not work on Macs.  The pen “package” does come with many ink cartridge refills.  I used the pen for four months in six hours per week of class before it needed a refill.
• How could we use this technology in the hybrid or traditional classroom?  Every day that we meet for my hybrid (part Internet, part classroom) Intermediate Algebra class, a different student takes notes using the digital pen and notebook.  They take the notes with them, I take the pen with me and upload that day’s notes to the web site.  Very quickly, we established the rule that those students that have been absent are the ones that should step forward to be note-takers, since they get the greatest benefit.
• How could we use this technology in the online classroom?  If the technology gets cheaper, or the student could get many semesters of use out of the pen, we could use this technology to have students “show their work” for problems requiring sophisticated use of notation or graphs.
• How could we use this technology in our professional lives?  The obvious use of this setup is for those folks who are not trained to create graphs or equations using a computer, but need to be able to communicate such figures using a computer.  You can attach the jpg file to an email and send your response to a question quite quickly.
• Wish list for this technology?   I would like an easier way to convert from the proprietary .pen files to pdf files.  Right now the conversion is .pen to .jpg (using the pen software) to .pdf using Adobe Acrobat Standard.  A cheaper setup cost would also be great to get mass use for students in online math classes.  Also pen software that works with Macs would be a plus.

(The bottom half of this article was taken from THIS site.  To read more click HERE, which is where the picture above was found.)

(To see more of my posts about twitter, click HERE.)

For all of you lovers’o’twitter, a site called Twitly will help you organize all of the people you follow into groups.  Like many of the other twiteresque sites, this one requires you to log in there at Twitly so that it will take the info from your twitter account to compile all of the sites into groups.

One problem I have is organization. I plan to change that this year. When students turn in papers in the past, I would put them in a stack on my desk. As the week of grading progressed, I would find papers of students who had not turned them in on they day they were due. However, I couldn’t count off an accurate number of points because I did not know how late they were. I’ve devised a plan that will help me with that, though.

THE PLAN:

I am going to have a file folder for each assignment. Each assignment will have a very large sticky label (a mailing label) on which I will have printed the name of every student I have (all 98 of them). When students hand them in on the first day, I will highlight them. Each day it is late, I will highlight the name a different color. If they slip it in without me knowing it, they do not get highlighted until I discover it.

This plan also gives me an extra place to record grades because I can write it down next to each name. That way I do not have to carry a grade book around with the risk of misplacing it (remember, I am not organized). To put it lightly, it is always a little disheartening to discover your grade book (or in my case, grade sheets) is missing. Since we use an electronic grading system, we are not required to have a grade book.

I digress.

If you have any ideas about how to keep organized with respect to grading, please leave your ideas in the comment box below.

I recently discovered 12Seconds.  This is a site where you can post videos with a length of (you guessed it) 12 seconds.  I would say that this is the video version of micro blogging.  It would be neat if this site could merge with Twitter (my twitter page is HERE).  I wish I could copy and paste code to embed such videos in our twitters.  I guess I could just copy and paste a link to your video.

Anyway, I am considering using this as a way to report what we did in class each day.  It only talkes 12 second and you only have to copy and paste a link on your site.  That would be very efficient.

If you can think of any other uses of this site, write about it in my comments.

In light of the record mentioned in the post prior to this one, I thought I’d post the top 3 articles.  These three articles have brought almost 4,000 hits to this site alone. Thanks for helping so much Kevin!

Never Make a Study Guide Again  by Ben

Creating Sub-Gmail Accounts for Kids  by Kevin

Ides of March - 1 day= Pi: Math, English by Ben

Thanks for all of your visits to this site.  Since since 5 p.m. this afternoon (8/7/08), we’ve had 1,078  1,108 hits.  That would be 7 hours before I began writing this short post.The last record was 1,500 +/- hits in 20 hours.

Thanks for your support!

Ben

A friend sent me an article today from Newsweek that I thought you should see:

The most hotly contested controversy sparked by the text-messaging phenomenon of the past eight years is over truant letters. “Textese,” a nascent dialect of English that subverts letters and numbers to produce ultra-concise words and sentiments, is horrifying language loyalists and pedagogues. And their fears are stoked by some staggering numbers: this year the world is on track to produce 2.3 trillion messages—a nearly 20 percent increase from 2007 and almost 150 percent from 2000. The accompanying revenue for telephone companies is growing nearly as fast—to an estimated $60 billion this year. In the English-speaking world, Britain alone generates well over 6 billion messages every month. People are communicating more and faster than ever, but some worry that, as textese drops consonants, vowels and punctuation and makes no distinction between letters and numbers, people will no longer know how we’re really supposed to communicate. Will text messaging produce generations of illiterates? Could this be the death of the English language?  

READ MORE OF THE ARTICLE HERE

Lately I have been wondering what the next step for Twitter would be.  It is a great service.  I use it frequently, but I wanted some new spice in it.  Today, I found the Twitter’s curry; it is called Phweet. The great thing about it is that it will not matter if it gives you bad breath because you will only be talking to the person via the internet.

Let’s suppose that I want to talk to Jamie about an idea I have for my blog.  I simply go to Phweet and type in Jamie’s username and the message I want to send (for example, “We neet to talk about aTeacheng.us post.”)  Jamie will then see that message on her twitter account and click the link given in the message.  When she does so, my internet browser will whistle, drawing my attention to a button I can click to begin talking.

This is awesome because I do not have to worry about downloading any kind of software, so I can use it on my school computer.  Also, it has potential for the classroom, if your students/parents use twitter.  You can conference via the net without adding anyone to your buddylist at other sites.

I see this as being particularly useful for the classroom as a way to be available for students the night before a test.

Here is a graph I found on Phweet’s blog:

In response to Ben’s post about Grammar Girl, I thought I should mention a site that I like to have in my RSS feeder. It is called Podictionary and it is run by Charles Hodgson (no relation — we have established this). Charles does a great job of digging into the history of words and presented them in an engaging style.

Recent words include:

• Humble
• Filibuster
• Scandal
• Freebooter

Here is how Charles describes his work:

“Every day podictionary delivers a new short story about the history of a common word to thousands of subscribed listeners.

Not only is podictionary an audio word-a-day, but as the number of words grows in the podictionary archive the website is becoming an on-line audio etymology reference of sorts.

It’s all for fun, so please enjoy.”

It’s worth a listen. You can subscribe in iTunes and other services, or just listen in your RSS reader (as I do).

– Kevin