Lewis Elementary

Snowing at Lewis and Working in the Lab...

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I'm at Lewis today working in the computer lab. Our PTA has a function going on and in spite of the weather, it is taking place and I needed to open the building for them. I'm using the time to reimage our old lab computers. Last Wednesday we unboxed and set up 23 new iMacs to add to 6 existing iMacs to bring our lab up to 29 computers. My music and technology teacher, Tony Jamesbarry and I spent most of Wednesday (another snow day...) imaging the new computers and today I am imaging the old lab eMacs in preparation for moving them out to classrooms to replace much older iMacs (the colorful ones...) As I mentioned the weather today is pretty bad. The worst we have had all week. The video below is the view outside the door that leads to our garden area. [flickr video=3122759179]

Video about Music, Art & Technology at Lewis Elementary

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This spring Emily Chapman talked with Lewis Elementary music/technology teacher Tony Jamesbarry about technology and art instruction at Lewis Elementary. The video provides an overview of our program and demonstrates some of the projects that students have been working on. Emily, a Media Studies graduate of the University of San Francisco, is an old family friend. She is working on two other videos about Lewis and I'll post those when they are finished.


Lewis Elementary School from timlauer on Vimeo.

Lewis BBQ...

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PTA Picnic

On Friday the Lewis Elementary PTA sponsored a BBQ and picnic on the school playground. Musical entertainment was provided by our own Boomin' Beats students and also a local Marimba Band which featured Lewis alum, Wilson Alness. In addition a local band lead by Lewis parent Chris Hawking also performed to a very appreciative crowd. It was a great event on a perfect spring evening and we had a great turnout.

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Lewis Butterfly Garden Project

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At Lewis, we are in the middle of creating a butterfly garden near the west side entrance to the building. This is being led by our Americorps Volunteer, Julia Hamlin, and with the help of many parents. Tomorrow, Sunday, May 18, we are having a work party to finish the project. Below are some images from our work this past week...

Beets

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Our Nutrition Services department is working to offer more locally produced food in our school cafeterias. They have a program called Harvest of the Month and on Tuesday they invited local media to our school to talk to students about the latest choice.... beets...

I hate beets

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ScreenFlow

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I spent some time this weekend learning how to use ScreenFlow, screencast creation software for Mac OS X. I have been using Jing to make short tutorials for my staff. These tutorials are short introductions that highlight features of our web site, or demonstrate how to do common computer tasks. While Jing is free, and has worked very well. I was impressed with the feature set of ScreenFlow and decided to purchase it.

I created two screencasts for my staff that are posted on our Staff Bulletin page. Since our staff page is behind a login, I have posted the videos here so you can see some of the features built into ScreenFlow. The callout feature is one that is very impressive. It allows you to highlight specific windows and darken surrounding objects. The mouse call out is similar in that it calls out a specific radius around the mouse cursor. In addition you can magnify the area within the callout circle. The ScreenFlow web site has several video tutorials that highlight the feature set built into ScreenFlow. A demo copy can be downloaded from their web site.

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Google Maps Screencast for Lewis Staff
Staff Bulletin Screencast for Lewis Staff

MLK Day at Lewis

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Today 23 volunteers braved the cold and come out to work at Lewis Elementary as part of our King Holiday Day of Service. We got quite a bit accomplished including pruning our apple trees, and the cleaning out of several flower beds. Along with students, staff and parents, our work party also included 8 Americorp volunteers who pitched in to help with the projects. It was a great event. Happy King Day.

Washable Lunch Trays at Lewis: Volunteers Needed

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Currently Portland Public Schools utilizes polystyrene foam trays in its school lunch program. Lewis Elementary School staff, parents and students have voiced concern about the environmental impact of polystyrene and have been looking to go back to washable trays. Through the help of our PTA, we have purchased washable trays and we are involved in a pilot program to use washable trays instead of polystyrene for some of our lunches. This program relies on parent and community volunteers coming in during the lunch hour and washing the trays. We currently use these trays on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, thus reducing the amount of polystyrene we put into the waste stream. We are looking for additional parent volunteers who are willing wash trays and commit their time a day a week between 11:40 and 1:00 pm to help with this effort.

If you can help, or would like more information please contact the Lewis Elementary School Americorp Volunteer, Julia Hamlin by phone at 503 9126 6360 or by email at lewislearninggardens@gmail.com

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Lewis parent helping with our lunch tray program...



School Starts...

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This year we have him full time and in addition to his music classes, instrumental band, recorder club, marimba group and tech/literacy he will be adding two technology/literacy periods a week for our 3rd grade students, and a piano lab section for our 2nd grade students.... They were very excited about the program and several of our teachers have asked for an afterschool session so they can also learn about the program too.As this school year begins, I am hoping to be a bit more faithful in updating this weblog with information about what the teachers and students at Lewis are up to.

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Earth Day at Lewis Elementary

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#flickr_badge_source_txt {padding:0; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif; color:#666666;} #flickr_badge_icon {display:block !important; margin:0 !important; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0) !important;} #flickr_icon_td {padding:0 5px 0 0 !important;} .flickr_badge_image {text-align:center !important;} .flickr_badge_image img {border: 1px solid black !important;} #flickr_www {display:block; padding:0 10px 0 10px !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#3993ff !important;} #flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:hover, #flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:link, #flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:active, #flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:visited {text-decoration:none !important; background:inherit !important;color:#3993ff;} #flickr_badge_wrapper {} #flickr_badge_source {padding:0 !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#666666 !important;} Under the direction of our Americorps volunteer Kelly Alsup and teacher Sarah Jones, Lewis was host today to an Earth Day work party.... Special thanks also to our PSU FEED team lead by Angela LeVan and Matt Billout for their help with this event, and also a big thank you to the Portland State University ESL students for their help.

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Chess Tournament at Lewis

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After the set up I was walking around talking with students and parents and noticed that one student's father was working away on his laptop. We have a building wide wireless network and he said he was getting a nice signal in the cafeteria and appreciated being able to get online while his son took part in the tournament.

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New Whiteboards

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New Whiteboards
Originally uploaded by timlauer.

Spent some time at school on Saturday helping my music teacher, Tony Jamesbarry, replace his old chalkboard with whiteboard material. He picked up two 4' x 8' sheets of tileboard for $22 at Lowe's. The dimensions of the old chalkboard were the same as the tile board, so we easily unscrewed the frame from the wall, took down the old chalkboard sheets, replaced them with the whiteboard sheets and reinstalled the framing. Quite an improvement...

We plan to tackle another classroom next week and hope to get them all completed through the course of the school year.


Flat Stanly Project at Lewis

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Flat Stanley Weblog
At Lewis Mrs. Crouse's 3rd grade classroom is taking part in a Flat Stanley activity with a classroom in Vancouver, WA. The idea behind this is that students share a paper Stanley and then write about the adventures of the visiting Stanley and share these adventures with the partner classroom. This can be accomplished through traditional mail, email or in our case a weblog. We looked at ways to make it easy for Mrs. Crouse's classroom and the one in Vancouver to share their stories. After much discussion we decided the easiest thing to do was to set up a weblog in Moveable Type running off the Lewis server and to then set up a Flickr account for the Flat Stanley classrooms to post their images to. Flickr allows users to upload images via email and also post a description from the body of the email to a blog using the XMLRPC interface. The classrooms taking part in the Flat Stanley project just have to send an email and the post will automaticly appear on the weblog along with the attached image file.

Flickr Notes...

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Alan Levine talks about the use of "Notes" in Flickr, the photosharing/community web space. Flickr has a feature where a user can assign notes to parts of an image. For example if you had a picture of a group of students, you could assign a note to each student which when moused over would reveal their name. A nice feature for a substitute teacher.

Alan talks about creating learning objects with Flickr. I think Flickr is a very interesting platform for education. For example at Lewis, some classrooms will soon be involved in the Flat Stanley Project. Flat Stanley is a book character and a rich tradition has grown up of students creating a paper version of Stanley and then sending him via postal mail to another school for a visit. In the process students at both schools share email (or a weblog post, or now, Flickr posts...) about Stanley's adventures at the visiting school.