fourth graders in Bob Sprankle’s classroom at Wells Elementary School

in Wells, Me. The online radio show features “Student News,” “The Week in Sports” and “Word of the

Week.” Mr. Sprinkle says, “The kids are incredibly motivated to read, research, and write.”

to give these kids the tools to say, “Hey, my voice is important in

this world,”  “This

history students participated in a group blog

as a joint project with David Boardman’s English class at Winthrop High

School in Maine. They discussed issues like drug dealing, gang

violence,urban legends, the new SAT’s, good reasons to skip the prom,

etc.” The diversity of topics was great. Patrick Delaney, Galileo’s

librarian helped the teachers set up the blogs. Nice to hear in a round

about way from Patrick. Patrick is probably one of the first “original

blogging pioneers.” He pointed out how “Having an audience compelled

these kids to step it up a notch.”

The article had some quotes from educators who were not sold on the

value of interactivity. Check out this line in the article: “Testing

requires a known body of material, but interactive learning often

involves students’ seeking out topics on their own. ” Heaven forbid,

huh?

However, Mr. Cunningham, a high school speech and debate teacher at Del

Valle High School in Del Valle, Tx closed with this simple but true

statement, “I think the testing model is working against education.

With Skype, you’re opening up the whole world to the student, and that

can’t help but be good.”  By the way, he runs the Skype Foreign

Language Lab, a program that allows students around the world to talk

with one another via computers and headsets using the free VoIP phone

service Skype. How cool is that?

One interesting side note was that the article linked to some of the

tools like the iPod, Google, and VoIP but all the links kept me on the

New York Times site. No links to the school sites. I had to look those up

myself. When you get to the Galileo site, check out all the good links.

It’s an incredible web site chock-full of interesting links to

resources. You’ll learn a lot!

I did not find a link to the Skype Foreign Language Lab but I ran

across these interesting Language and International Resources at

Dickinson College that links to blogs and how to use Skype with foreign

language learning. Ahhhh, why wouldn’t we want our students to have

some time to pursue learning branched off of what they have already

learned? Don’t we want them to make connections and build on their knowledge? But that’s a post for another time…..