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Opening Day at Lewis

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Below is what I shared with my staff on our staff bulletin blog tonight... It was a very good day today.

I wanted to thank all of you for a great first day of school. The sight of so many smiling children and parents is something I always look forward to as we start the new school year. I had an opportunity to spend time in every classroom and I saw happy and hopeful children. I saw teachers and support staff focused on engaging students and welcoming them to the new school year. The best part of my work is to be able to walk into your classrooms and talk to students about the work they are doing and why it is important.

I had the opportunity to view parts of President Obama's address to students in two of our classrooms. It is a message that should resonate with all of us. Work hard, do your best, respect your teachers, you have a responsibility to succeed, never give up... It was delivered with passion and an understanding that the work that we do can shape the arc of a student's life. It is important and valuable work that we have the honor of doing and I felt that the President hit the mark in helping our students understand how important education can be in shaping their lives. If you would like to view his address, please follow this link: President Obama's Address to Students.

Finally, as I traveled around the school today, I heard many comments from students that make me proud to work with such a dedicated group of professionals. Below are just a few...

"Best day of school ever."

"I really like my teacher."

"You know, she really is a very good teacher."

"I like being at Lewis."

"She is nice."

"This is cool."

"How's it going? ""It's going really well.""

"Can I recycle?"

"Can I play Candy Land?"

"He helps me."

"I like it here."

We work in a very special place. You all make it so. Thank you for such a great first day of school.

Audio Postcards with Posterous

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I've been playing around a bit with Posterous and its ability to post audio recordings from my iPhone along with several images to create audio postcards. The example linked below is of a recent trip up to Mt. Tabor park for an evening concert. It is a pretty easy process.( a good description of this can be found on John Johnston's Posterous blog...) Basically I take some images, then using the iPhone's audio recorder app, I record a message and then select the email option. I paste a few images from the Camera Roll app and add any text and then email the message to my posterous account and I have a post with images, text and an audio file. I have created a separate Posterous blog for these audio postcards and I can route the RSS feed from this blog to my timlauer.org account and embed the audio postcard feed in the sidebar. Posterous is really an interesting tool for streaming content to lots of different places...

Concert on Mt. Tabor. If this was a SEC event I might be in trouble.

 

Soul City playing at Mt. Tabor Park

 

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via audiopostcards.posterous.com

 

Posted via web from Tim's posterous

picPosterous

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John Johnston has a post up about picPosterous, an iPhone camera app that allows you to post a series of photos to a posterous post. Nice for adding images to a gallery over the course of an event or through the course of a day. John points out a few limitations and from reading the developers blog it looks as if those will be addressed. One feature I would like to see is the ability to add images to various galleries rather than just the last one created. I could see using this to document classroom visits and samples of student work. Would be nice to have the ability to choose which of my recent galleries to post an image to. For example I might create a gallery for specific classrooms and as I take images I can post them in the appropriate classroom gallery.

picPosterous

Sunday 23 August 2009 at 10:18 pm.

picPosterous is a photo and video publishing app for the iPhone.

Picposterous 0Picposterous 1

At first glance I could not see the advantage of using this rather than the iPhone's mail application, and neither could TechCrunch but a tweet or two from Sachin, one of posterous's founders both put me on the right track and gave further evidence that the posterous guys never sleep.

via johnjohnston.info

 

Posted via web from Tim's posterous

Questions to ask when your child comes home from school...

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Will Richardson has a nice post up about the start of the new school year and questions about school that he hopes his own children will have answers to when they are asked about their school day. A nice way to frame what we would like our students to experience in our classrooms. More suggestion from the folks in the post comments...

What did you make today that was meaningful?

What did you learn about the world?

Who are you working with?

What surprised you?

What did your teachers make with you?

What did you teach others?

What unanswered questions are you struggling with?

How did you change the world in some small (or big) way?

What’s something your teachers learned today?

What did you share with the world?

What do you want to know more about?

What did you love about today?

What made you laugh?

via weblogg-ed.com

 

Posted via web from Tim's posterous

Your Flowing Data Uploader

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See and download the full gallery on posterous

I've recently written about a web data tool called Your Flowing Data. It
allows you to enter data based on keywords using direct messages to
Twitter. For example I have been biking to work for the past few weeks
and have been using Your Flowing Data to keep track of my mileage.
While opening up a Twitter client and direct messaging my information
via the client is not to time consuming, I have been looking for a way
to streamline this process. I found an iPhone app that helps with
this. Your Flowing Data Uploader is a simple interface for entering
data into Your Flowing Data. You can add your own terms so keeping
track of different types of data is pretty easy. I plan to use this
method once school starts to keep track of classroom visits and this
little app should help with that process.

 

Posted via email from Tim's posterous

Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books

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"To counter Amazon.com, Sony and other device makers as well as several publishers will use the same technology, called ePub, for digital book sales..."   via nytimes.com

The New York Times reports that Sony announced that they will now support and use the ePub digital book standard. This will help address the issue of not reading digital content on multiple devices. Before this announcement Sony utilized its own format and those digital books could only be read on the Sony device. By the end of the year it will only sell digital book in the ePub format. Should be interesting to see if the rumored Apple tablet device also will support ePub. If so, this might make it difficult for Amazon to keep its own separate format. In the end what I hope happens is that digital content will be independent of what ever device you read it with.

Posted via web from Tim's posterous

Audio Postcard: Walking in the Lewis Garden

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See and download the full gallery on posterous

  
Download now or listen on posterous

Memo.m4a (1086 KB)

I have been looking for a method to post images, text, and audio to the web in a single post using my iPhone, and through the use of Posterous have come up with a work flow that does this for me. Posterous is a web publishing tool that you post to via email. You can attach digital files such as photos, audio files, video files and various text files to the email and they will automatically be formatted and posted to your Posterous blog. In addition you can set up your Posterous account so that anything you post to Posterous will also be posted other sites such as a blog, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and a number of other web publishing sites.

The example above is an audio postcard that I sent to Posterous via email from my iPhone. I started out by taking a few photographs in the garden. I then reviewed the images in the Photos app. In Photos you now have the option of selecting multiple images and once selected, you can copy them to the clipboard. Once I had my images on the clipboard, I then launched the Voice Memo app and recorded my audio message. In Voice Memo, you have the option of emailing your recorded memo. By selecting this option, Voice Memo launched the Mail app and attached the audio message to an email. I then addressed the email to my Posterous account, pasted in the images I had previously copied from the Photos app, added my text to the email message, and then sent the email to my Posterous account.

I'm toying with ways of using this in my work. Maybe keeping an audio journal in Posterous of classroom visits and walk throughs. Am thinking a teacher could set something like this up and utilize an iPod Touch to have students post a daily audio message about what went on that day in class. (If rumors are correct, the updated iPod Touch will include a camera and then they could be utilized in the manner I outlined above.) Posterous provides an option to make a Posterous blog post private and you can also set up multiple Posterous blogs... More to think about and play with...

Posted via email from Tim's posterous

Note: I do wish that Posterous would format the content on my blog, the way that it is formatted in my Posterous blog... See image below...

Audio Postcard: Walking in the Lewis Garden - Tim's posterous
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