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Staying Connected Through Snow Days
Living in Huron County, Ontario offers many advantages – great agricultural land and lovely beaches, to name a few. However, due to the strong and cold northwest winds blowing over the relatively...
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Word Shakers in the Idea Hive
In his TEDGlobal talk, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson uses the term, “liquid network” to describe a learning environment where innovation and deep thinking happens. He describes it as “kind...
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Diigo Groups for Student Collaboration
Diigo is one of the most useful Web 2.0 tools I’ve discovered in the last year. It’s a virtual filing cabinet where I store all my useful links. A few months ago, I introduced this valuable tool to...
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Connecting Students with Online Book Clubs & VoiceThread
Part of my language arts program is the incorporation of student led Book Clubs (similar to Literature Circles). Over the past year however, the process has lost its luster for the students and I. But...
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Facebook Book Club: Engaging Intermediate Readers
As spring rounds the corner, most intermediate students take on a new focus, which often does not include classroom work. So it’s important to find activities that keep these adolescents engaged in...
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The Sum of the Whole is Greater Than its Parts: A Field Guide to Molching
As the students move towards the end of this year’s collaboration in the Idea Hive, Clarence and I presented our students with the book they wrote together, while living 2 700 km apart. A Field Guide...
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Author of “The Book Thief” Visits the Idea Hive Classroom
The Idea Hive classroom is almost out for the summer. But just before the year ends, the students had, as one of them described, the “opportunity of a lifetime” – a Skype visit from the award-winning...
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Using Yodio for Digital Storytelling & Poetry
During the last few weeks of school, I had my students play with a few new-to-us web 2.0 storytelling tools that Alan Levine introduced in his 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story wiki. Although we first...
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Powerful Holocaust Learning Experiences & Connections
My class recently finished reading the non-fiction novel, Ten Marks and a Train Ticket: Benno’s Escape to Freedom. It’s the story of Benno (9) and Heinz (13), two brothers who were put on a train in...
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Steering our Students Towards Poetry
Graphic organizers, templates, frameworks, checklists. Sometimes they really fit the need. Most of my intermediate students and I appreciate the guidance when it comes to connecting, creating, and,...
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Supporting our Students with “Talking Text”
Over the past few years, I’ve had some of my students use the Livescribe or Echo smartpens for various oral assessment pieces. These smartpens contain a camera at the tip of the pen which read the...
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