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Stan's Cafe Theatre Company: Of All The People In All The World

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I stumbled on to this via an item in Tom Hoffman's Google Reader Shared Items list. I'm finding Shared Items to be one of my best sources of interesting items found on the web.

Of All The People In All The World (UK) uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statisitcs to startling and powerful life.

Each grain of rice = one person and you are invited to compare the one grain that is you to the millions that are not. Over a period of days a team of performers carefully weigh out quantities of rice to represent a host of human statistics

- the populations of towns and cities - the number of doctors, the number of soldiers - the number of people born each day, the number who die - all the people who have walked on the moon - deaths in the holocaust.

The statistics are arranged in labelled piles creating an ever changing landscape of rice. The statistics and their juxtapositions can be moving, shocking, celebratory, witty and thought provoking. [From Stan's Cafe Theatre Company: Of All The People In All The World]

Stanza eBook Reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch

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Lexcycle.com has an application called Stanza, an ebook reader for the Mac. I recently wrote about Stanza and use it quite a bit to convert content for use on my Kindle. The version I used before also had the ability to export a book into a Safari bookmarklet format. By saving the bookmarklet file to your Safari bookmarks, you could then tranfer the file to your theiPhone via a sync. While this worked, it did cause performance issues for the Safari browser.

Lexcycle has now created an iPhone/iPod Touch application that allows you to easily transfer books and other documents from your Mac to your iPhone. In addition you can also download them directly from online directories such as Feedbooks. A local wireless connection is made between your computer and device and you can then browse for open Stanza documents and import them into your iPhone/iPod Touch. Below are some screenshots that highlight this process.

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Summer Reading List

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Chris Lehmann tagged me with his Summer Reading meme, so below I have listed what I have been recently reading and what I plan to read over the summer.

Recently Read:

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Steven Johnson

Shakespeare, by Bill Bryson

Currently Reading:

A Schoolmaster of the Great City, by Angelo Patri
This weeks selection in the Gary Stager book club is quite frankly a remarkable book. I am about a third of the way into it, and am finding it fascinating to read the reflections of this man who wrote of his experience over 90 years ago. I believe that we who work in education do not think enough about those who came before us and this book is a good reminder that we need to take advantage of that knowledge.

Queued up in the Kindle, or soon will be, or on the coffee table...

The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It , Jonathan Zittrain
photo.jpgI have this on my Kindle, and also on my phone thanks to a Twitter post by Bud Hunt who alerted me to the fact that Zittrain has made electronic copies of the book available on the web. Recently I came across a great ebook reading tool for Mac OS called Stanza. Stanza has the ability to read and convert from several different ebook formats and one option is to convert a book to a .plist file, or basically a bookmark. It's an interesting way to put ebooks on an iPhone/iPodTouch. More about Stanza here...

The Post American World, by Fareed Zakaria

In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen

The Great Deluge, by Douglas Brinkley

Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
The story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox and the eight ball players who threw the 1919 World Series...

Wanted to also note that I am really enjoying the ability to download a sample chapter to the Kindle before buying a book. I find myself listening to interviews with authors and then looking on Amazon for the Kindle edition of the book and then downloading the sample chapter. Quite frankly, Amazon makes the book buying process a little too easy... :-)

Video: Art at Lewis, Overview of Art, Music and Technology at Lewis Elementary

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Below is the second in a series of videos about Lewis Elementary School produced by Emily Chapman. The video below is a piece edited down from the original that focuses mainly on the arts at Lewis The second one is an overview of the art, music and technology programs at Lewis.. A third video will have a focus on the technology program at Lewis and will be posted soon...
Art at Lewis from timlauer on Vimeo.


Lewis Elementary School from timlauer on Vimeo.

And The Band Honked On...

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Today The New York Times has an article about a program called the Academy that offers fellowships to graduates of leading music schools to receive high-level coaching and lessons in a two-year program. In return they commit to teach music one and a half days in New York public schools.

It was early in the school year. A young professional French horn player named Alana Vegter, a thoroughbred musician trained by elite teachers, took a handful of trumpet and trombone players into an equipment supply room. Speaking in the flat tones of the Chicago suburb where she grew up, Ms. Vegter tried to coax notes out of each player. A tall sixth-grade trumpeter named Kenny Ocean, his pants sagging around his hips, played too high, then too low. A smile spread across his face when he hit it right.

[From Music - In a Year at a Brooklyn School, a Professional French Hornist Encounters Music at Its Most Basic - NYTimes.com]

Lewis Butterfly Garden

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On Thursday we began construction of a butterfly garden around the SW entrance to my school, Lewis Elementary. This garden was made possible through the $3,700 WISE Owl Grant and PSU. The design is by our Americorp Volunteer, Julia Hamlin

We are in need of volunteers to help on the following days:

  • Thursday, May 1st 3-6 (cut trenching for pathway),
  • Thursday May 15th 3-6 (load sod in a trailer & spread compost),
  • Sunday May 18th 9-12 (planting)
  • Thursday May 22nd 3-6 (finishing touches and bird bath installation).

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Playing with WordPress 2.5

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I finally updated my WordPress install to 2.5 for this blog, and several of my school blogs. So far things are working well. I like the new interface. It is a lot lighter and cleaner. I also like the new Gallery feature for uploading images. An example of which you can see below.


Remembering Dr. Kings' Prophetic 'Mountaintop' Speech

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Remembering MLK's Prophetic 'Mountaintop' Speech
NPR has a nice roundup of information as we near the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. King.

April 3, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final public speech. In a crowded church in Memphis, Tenn., King spoke of the injustice felt by the city's sanitation workers, who were on strike protesting low pay and poor working conditions. But, speaking hours before his assassination, the civil rights leader went beyond that subject, touching on death and his own mortality...

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Google Spreadsheets Collaboration Features...

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Google has recently added some new features to its Google Docs Spreadsheets that now allow you to pull collaborative data from Google Spreadsheets into gadgets for display on iGoogle and also for embedding into other platforms. The Google Docs Blog has a post that outlines the new features.

One way a teacher might use these tools is to create a spreadsheet and form that surveys students on a particular question or series of questions. Using the form feature, one could easily link to the form from a classroom blog or via email. Students could follow the link to the survey, fill it out and in real time the results could be available to the teacher, displayed on a web page, or displayed for the class via a data projector. If available, students could use their cell phones or other web appliances to access the form and enter their responses. Kind of a low cost "clicker".

Below is a simple example. Here is a link to the form I created called : Favorite Team. It is a simple one question form regrading your favorite Oregon college team. If you follow the link you can fill out the form and watch the totals change below. To get the totals I used the countif command. Update: I'm having some trouble consistently getting the data below to update, but I have also embedded these on my iGoogle page and they update automatically. Will do some research and see why they aren't updating below...

200803292152I am using something similar to keep track of my classroom visits and walk-thrus. I have created a Google Docs spreadsheet to document my classroom visits. I capture the date/time, teacher name, subject area being taught, and some other curricular information and also have a field for notes. I have the link to the form saved on my iPhone. When visiting classrooms I access the form on my phone and enter the information. Once I submit the form, the spreadsheet is automatically updated along with a bar chart that graphically displays the number of visits I have made to each particular classroom. Being able to visually see this running totals helps to guide my visits and assures that I visit each classroom.

The connected nature of applications, such as Google Docs, provides many interesting ways to collect, display and share data.

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