Audience Assignment: Watch Drew’s Book Reviews

books

Alexander and Sarah: I have a homework assignment for you. I want you to watch, listen, and think about Oklahoma student Drew’s two book reviews that he has posted on Ustream. Here are the two links you’ll need to use:

Drew’s First Book Review V-Cast

Drew’s Second Book Review V-Cast

After you watch each one, I want you to write a thoughtful and specific comment which gives Drew some feedback about the ideas he’s discussed in each book review.

I’d like you to also copy and paste your comments for Drew here, on this blog post.

Let me know if you have questions. I’d like you to complete this over the weekend. Good luck, and have fun!

Love, Dad

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Videos of the Rangitata Valley and Mt Sunday

dad, travel

Yesterday I visited Mt Sunday in New Zealand, which was the set for Edoras in the film trilogy “The Lord of the Rings.” This is one video in a series I took yesterday and uploaded to Flickr.

Read more about this on my main blog post “Erewhon, Mt Sunday (Edoras) and the Rangitata Valley.” More photos are available on my Flickr set “Edoras and Erewhon.” I have ten more videos from yesterday to still upload and will add them to my New Zealand video Flickr set soon. In all I had over 400 MB of videos to upload last night (which I left going as I slept) and I think that really taxed Shirley’s ADSL connection! 🙂

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NZ Travel Update: LAX

dad, travel

I recorded another short archived webcast via Qik this evening in the LAX airport enroute to the 2009 Learning at School conference in Rotorua, New Zealand. I posted my first “in airport” video update over on my main blog, but since updates like this one may bore readers to that blog looking for educational technology related posts I thought I’d post here on Learning Signs instead.

Our flight for Auckland boards in just a few minutes. In another 10 or so hours, I should be in New Zealand!

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Character Map of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

sister, socialstudies

Sarah brainstormed the following character map for her biography book report on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis this evening with her mother. I put her concept map into Webspiration tonight and printed it for her to turn in Monday in class. The embeddable version of this Webspiration map uses the “iFrame” tag. Here is a Skitch screenshot posted to Flickr.

Webspiration - [Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis]

Nice work Sarah! We may record a VoiceThread using this character map as an outline tomorrow morning.

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39 Clues

books, brother, writing

I just finest the book the 39 Clues, The Maze of Bones. There are ten books in this whole series and the cool thing is that all of them are written by all different authors so you get a feel for a different witting styles. The first book is written by Rick Riordan who wrote the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. If you have read the Artemis Fool books, another good series, it is a lot like that. I t is about two kids who go on this big clue hunt to become the most powerful person in the world. If you read the first two pages you will end up reading the rest of the book and the whole series.

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Arrow of Light Ceremony

brother, scouts

Tonight Alexander bridged up from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts, and received the highest award in Cub Scouting: The Arrow of Light.

I used the free iTalk application on my iPhone to record most of the ceremony, and later used Audacity to amplify the recording so it is much louder. This is the recorded, edited ceremony, which is just over 29 minutes long.

More information about the process of using the iTalk application and the free iTalk iSync program is available.

I also used my iPhone to snap photos during the ceremony.

We are so proud of you and your accomplishments, Alexander!

Alexander’s Indian name, which Shelly and I gave him together, is “Purple Shirt.” He is always wearing purple KSU shirts and sweatshirts, so this is a very appropriate name for him. Alexander also received his God and Family award tonight, which he has worked hard to complete.

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Webkinz (cheats)

brother, technology, webkinz, websites

If you are a Webkinz owner you would say,”I don’t want cheats they might take away my Webkinz!” But Wait! There are other ways where they don’t take away your Webkinz. In gem hunt where are the gems? Is there a rare item on right now? How do you make all the Webkinz recipes? How do you get a Webkinz Trophy?

I have all these links and more and now you can too:

On the Public Enemies set
Creative Commons License photo credit: bourgeoisbee

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Audiobooks

books, brother, technology

Lately, I have been listening to Brisinger on my iPod. When my mom or dad ask what I am listening to they always laugh when I tell them I am listening to a book. I think I can go thought it faster listening to it than reading it. I think listening to a book rather than to listen to music. I wonder what book I am going to listen to next?

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A nightly spelling bee for Dad

brother, dad

I’m glad Alexander is in the midst of a writing assignment for school, but I honestly feel like I’m having to compete in a nightly spelling bee with all the words I’m being asked to spell now in the evenings.

spelling test
Creative Commons License photo credit: elginwx

It has been abundantly clear to me for several years that Alexander has similar spelling abilities to his mother: Spelling is very challenging for him. I think this stems from him not being as visually oriented in his natural learning style. I am a pretty decent speller, and I think that has a lot to do with my ability to visualize words. Even when he is asking me to spell words for his writing assignment, I have to visualize them in my mind to spell them aloud. I MUCH prefer to write down a word than to spell it out loud. Really, spelling bees are such a DUMB idea, I wish they were not so common in schools. The ability to verbally spell a word upon command is not an important “life skill.” Of course it is important to write well with correct spelling, but being able to do that is very different from being able to succeed at oral spelling exercises.

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