Women's March on Washington Minnesota-style

So it's been awhile and I have been busy with life, haven't we all?

My last post was about my return to Twitter. And I must say that after a few rocky starts I am using it again to expand my thinking and broaden my perspectives. On my! What time to be alive!

This post will be my reflections of the Women's March that took place in cities and towns around the globe on January 21st. I marched in St Paul, MN with 100,000 friends and neighbors. It was amazing. The buses and trains were overwhelmed, so for many people the march began with the walk to get there. For me that was two miles from where we got off one bus to transfer, only to find that all subsequent buses were too full to pick up passengers at any more stops. All along the route to the march and on the march to the capitol, women, girls, men, boys walked together in community with the hope that we were doing something special, that we were making a difference, that we were marching in solidarity for equality, freedom, justice, self determination, human rights for all women.

My friends and I did note that while the signs acknowledged respect for diversity and there were people of color present, overall it was a fairly white crowd. Now at 85% Caucasian, Minnesota isn't known for it's diversity, but Saint Paul itself is only 60% white and over a quarter of the population speaks a language other that English at home so we were a little sad that we saw mostly people who looked like us participating.

Since the march I have been reading on Twitter and Facebook of how people of color, indigenous people and gender non-conforming people were treated poorly at the Women's March in DC. Reading their stories has been a lesson for me. White privilege is so ingrained in our beings as women in the dominant culture that even when we are trying to do the right thing, we further marginalize the very people we say we want to help.  If this is something you'd like to explore, I encourage you to look for people around you or to follow on social media who are very different from yourself and seek to understand their stories. What they say may trigger a defensive response but the resist the urge to say, "That's not me." If we white women are truly going to make a difference, we must do a better job of listening to every voice and not expect everyone to experience the world as we are accustomed to living it.

Now, I want to end with a picture of my grandma's gloves.

I wore these on Saturday to march. My grandma, who died in 2000, came as an immigrant with her family to the United States as a young girl the year that women here won the right to vote. She was a quiet but fiercely independent woman who worked all her life to make the world a better place. I marched for her and for my daughter and for my four-day-old granddaughter with the hope that despite the way things look right now, we can make the world a better place for all women in whatever form we are present.

Giving Twitter another look

After a two and a half year hiatus, I have been back on Twitter for a week. I came back because a colleague has just begun to play with it and I thought I’d reconnect in support of her efforts.

As far as I can tell, not much has changed since I was last active. The folks I follow, true believers in education amongst a cacophony of self-promoters and wilderness criers are still tweeting out quotes, quips and links to articles they think will change the world.

My problem, and yes, it is my problem, with Twitter, the reason I left is this. I can’t build and maintain relationships in a sea of chaos. And for me communication should be about developing relationships, not spouting fascinating tidbits for whomever happens to be floating by. Have I grasped anything useful in the last week by watching the tweets scroll down the screen? Yes, I’ll admit to having learned a few things I may not have known without Twitter. Therefore, if I am to stay active on Twitter this time around, I’ll need to change my expectation of the medium. For it to work for me, I’ll need to treat it more as a river of information and opinion rather than a place to connect with friends.

I took a break from Twitter because I was more comfortable with my “friends” on Facebook, most of whom I know well in my day-to-day real life. But I’ll give Twitter a go for another week or two and see what happens.

AnswerGarden 2

Thanks to all those who have responded to the AnswerGarden question I planted a few days ago. Here is what I have learned about AnswerGarden since.

As people come to your question and add new answers they appear in the display box. It is also possible for visitors to vote or agree with answers that are already there by clicking on them. When you click on an existing answer it appears in a text box and then you click "submit" to register your vote.

At anytime you can use your original link to go back to your question and see how many people have answered.

I'd also like to a couple of things you can do with the answers after you've collected them. The first thing you may notice is that some answers are bigger and bolder than the others. These are the ones with more than one vote. You can find out how many votes each has by hovering over text with your cursor.

The number of votes will appear.

Clicking the options button below the display box will expand your view and you'll be able see how many total answers you've received. Finally, you have the option of exporting your answers directly to Wordle or Tagxedo as I did to generate the image at the beginning of this post.

If you have an interactive whiteboard, your students could enter their answers right on the board while the whole group watches the work progress. Don't you think this would be an engaging way for young students to learn to gather and analyse data?

AnswerGarden

Please bear with me while I try out a newly discovered tool. Answer Garden looks like a quick and easy way to gather short comments from a group. After a couple of minutes of checking the particulars on the website, I created this AnswerGarden poll.

This time of year in northern North America most of us are desparately looking forward to spring. Today we in Minnesota are getting yet another round of snow and from here that snow is headed to Chicago and then off to the East where I can't imagine they have anymore room to put it than we do at this point. Therefore, as a coping mechanism, in my poll I am offering winter-stressed folks an opportunity be hopeful about spring, but even if you're in an area that is not buried under an icy blanket of white stuff right now, please help me out by submitting your words of encouragement.

I can see AnswerGarden being simple to use even with young students. There are no accounts. You get a link that you can hand out to your group and it goes right to your poll. No sign in or further navigation is required. Check it out. What do you think?

Active Listening?

Listening centers have been around for a long time, probably as long as we have been able to record sound. I remember sitting on the floor in my kindergarten class listening to music from Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker Suite" while watching the phonograph needle dance lightly over the top of the spinning record. That was nearly fifty years ago. We have many more options now, yes?

This morning I had a dream. It may have been spurred by a conversation I had this week with a teacher who is converting his classroom books on CD's to mp3's. In the dream I was a student in a class where the instructor asked us to share a wish we had for our school. In my dream I thought about it a bit and then told of a new feature I would like to add to our library. It would be a listening center where kids could come in and “check out” audio resources (stories, songs, podcasts, the possibilities here seem endless) and instead of sitting of the floor or at tables in chairs, they would have a variety of exercise equipment choices. These could include exercise balls, yoga mats, stationary bicycles or even treadmills. I am not so sure about the bikes and treadmills. Can we have kids use them? Is there an age requirement? But you get the idea; kids need to wiggle and stretch even if it’s just a little bit, so why can’t we combine activity and listening in a way that will make both more fun and productive?



 Gregory Rec/Maine Sunday Telegram Staff Photographer: Third graders sit on fitness balls at their desks at Peaks Island Elementary School on Wednesday, January 27, 2010.



Right now in our school a couple classes are using exercise balls, although not to the extent that this classroom is. Our students and teachers using them and those interviewed for this article published February 26, 2010, in the Maine Sunday Telegram seem to like them and feel they are beneficial. Is anyone using them in libraries or listening centers? What do you think? Is it doable?

Learning Movie Maker

Today I set out to teach myself Windows Movie Maker. Eight years with a pc and until now I haven't had a need to use it. Well, I have been given a video assignment, so now is the time and here is my first stab at it. Most I did by figuring out the features myself, but when I got stuck I went to these resources: Windows Movie Makers and Editing Video with Windows Movie Maker 2.0. For music I went to Freeplay Music.

Oh, and this is also the first time I have every posted anything to YouTube. Welcome your constructive comments. Thanks!

Spelling Mania

Many of you are Spelling City fans, as well you should be if you're an elementary school teacher teaching spelling. This site is the best I have seen for offering many different teaching and reinforcement activities using words from your own lists and curriculum. So if you haven't seen it yet, do check out Spelling City.


After that, I encourage you to try these other spelling sites. No accounts are needed to use them.

Literacy Zone's English Spelling Games: This one has interactive stories and 14 spelling games addressing such spelling skills as plurals, clusters and blends, synonyms, prefixes and suffixes and homophones.

Mr. Nussbaum's Everglades Spelling: I liked this one because I could pick the animal I wanted to be and race against the others to fill in the missing letters in words as they appear.

Gumleaf Games Word Safari: This one has different challenge levels and I can see kids really liking it. Once I figured out I had to use the arrow keys to guide my little guy through the air (think "Up") to the correct letters while dodging the incorrect ones, I had a great time.

Candlelight Stories Stellar Speller: This one has kids spell the words for pictures they see. I think it might be good for partner work because some kids might not have the prior knowledge to know the exact word for the picture. It is like hangman in that it gives the number of letters for each word.

Zaner-Bloser's Spelling Connections: Beside complete the sentence and word sorting activities, this site has a proof-reading game where students find errors in prepared text and correct them using proofing marks and proper spelling.

Language Arts Spell It: This one is a collection offering about 40 spelling games including a number of quizzes and bees.

Photo credit to Mr Gustafson on WikiMedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chelsea,_England,_Spelling_Lesson,_1912.JPG