Creating Lifelong Learners

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Also, please update any links from needleworkspictures.com/ocr/blog to creatinglifelonglearners.com

Due to problems with my webhost, I’ve moved my site to its own domain at http://www.creatinglifelonglearners.com

Needleworkspictures.com blog links will continue to work for awhile but will eventually go offline.  I am not posting to the old blog any more.  This is the only blog I’m updating.

Thanks for reading

For teachers of the Open Court Reading Program, OpenCourtResources.com now has its own page on Facebook.  Please show your support by becoming a fan.  Click on “Become a Fan.”  It’s very cool to see and hear from web site visitors and if there are any special events going on with the site I may post an update to the page.

Click here to visit Facebook page (visit from home because it’s probably blocked in your school district).

Happy New Year!

Over the three week holiday vacation, I moved and was without internet access for a couple of weeks. The first e-mail that came through once I was back online was from our new superintendent. I try to avoid being political in my blog but turmoil is happening throughout my district. I think I have a duty to report the facts.

1. About two years ago, the district hired a new superintendent, a retired Navy admiral with no education experience, to lead Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the largest school districts in the country.

2. About a month ago, the district fired the Navy admiral due to his lack of educational experience and inability to get things done.

3. While declaring that he “would always be [there] for their children of Los Angeles,” the fired Admiral demanded to personally be paid $500,000 plus expenses in order to leave his post at the district which is now facing bankruptcy.

4. Due to the state’s budget crisis, which is worse now than the one that faced California before the Terminator replaced an impeached Gray Davis five years ago, money is being taken from school budgets.

5. Our new superintendent is calling for mid-year cuts including letting about 2,300 probationary teachers go immediately with the required two weeks notice. (These teachers would also need to pay back money they’ve already been pre-paid for the coming school months). These cuts would save only a fraction of the $250 million dollar shortfall.

6. Literacy coaches, like myself, would be placed in classrooms immediately.

7. Our teachers’ union is calling for no cuts at all and is threatening job actions to fight the cuts.

8. Neither the district nor the union wants to trim the school year by a week which would save the entire amount of the $250 million that the district needs to cut.

I believe that no one wants to make cuts, particularly cuts to personnel, but it’s clear that cuts need to be made somewhere unless the state’s budget improves. Unfortunately, cuts to personnel and/or class size increases when done mid-year would be extremely disruptive, one might say chaotic, in terms of the shuffling of students and teachers.  I doubt whether this is a task that our district can handle purely as a matter of logistics.  None of our union contracts are even adequate to address the wide-spread shuffling and domino effect that might occur.

Even though my fiancé and I are both teachers in the same district and would be hit doubly hard by cuts to the school year.  I personally would rather see our year slightly shortened than see teachers lose their jobs.

Naturally, I suppose it’s too much to ask that someone bailout our failing school district.

For more info:  L.A. Times

I will be taking a one week vacation from my laptop this week.  I will not be checking e-mail, updating my sites, or approving blog comments in that time.

I think between blog reading, twittering, linkedin, and all the rest I’ve  become a tad addicted to the internet and especially because I have some legitimate business to do I’m going to try putting it all away for a week to take a legitimate vacation.

I’d like to be able to sleep late without feeling like I need to get up to go online.  I’d like to give my hands a rest from typing.  And I’d like to experience life for a week like what it was before computers. I know that I will be going through withdrawal for a few days but after that it should get better.

I have a few posts that will go live in my absense.  However, I won’t be back in person until August 6th. Thanks for hanging in there.

What is Needleworks Pictures?

Needleworks Pictures is the name of my film production company which became my first web site as well. When I started Open Court Resources I didn’t want to pay for a second host so Open Court Resources became a back door to the Needleworks site. Four years later, I go to workshops where people come up to me, point, and call me Needleworks. I find it quite funny. The name itself was a take off on my name and Dreamworks Pictures which was founded about the same time.

Today, Needleworks hosts about twenty educational sites even as Open Court Resources has found its own domain. The focus of my web sites and filmmaking have clearly shifted away from personal films and more towards standards-based digital storytelling by and for children.

It was time for Needleworks Pictures, the web site, to reflect that. On the main page are now links to my three most popular web sites and a password-protected link to the old Needleworks as well.

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A Brief History of My Blog
(Open Court Reading Strategy: Summarizing)

Birth

This blog started last year as another way of communicating with visitors of my site, Open Court Resources.com.

Open Court, for the uninitiated, is the required reading series in Los Angeles Unified and many other large districts across the country. Some people love it, some people hate it. My site started four years ago as a way for my first grade colleagues and I to share resources with each other from any internet connected computer. It has grown to include all grade levels and thousands of resources contributed by teachers across the country.

Hello Lifelong Learners

While the Open Court site gets thousands of visits daily I started feeling limited by what I could write about on the “Open Court Resources Blog”. In changing the blog’s name to Creating Lifelong Learners in October, I began to feel freer to write about integrating technology, educational practice in general, and I’ve been able to get a little more personal.

I hope I’m still relevant to Open Court teachers but of interest to others as well.

Hello to Hollywood

Last month I relaunched my site, Video in the Classroom.com, and that site needed a blog. Rather than split my audience and my own energy between two blogs I hope you don’t mind that the video in the classroom blog has moved in here.

If you only want to read the video related posts you can choose the “video in the classroom” category on the right. However, in the real world very few of us are able to teach only video and so I focus on integrating video production into the curriculum. How to teach reading and writing and video production at the same time.

So What’s This Blog About?

Literacy. All types.

Traditional, digital, media, film.

As my concept of twenty-first century literacy grows and changes, so too does this blog.

I hope you’ll continue reading or start reading (maybe even bring a friend) and come along with me on this journey.

Thanks for reading.

Updated City Wildlife lesson plans.

Also found a good site for bird video watching, Bird Cinema.com

I’m finally caught up on the backlog of site updates.  There are several more to add but if you submitted your resources more than a week ago and you still don’t see them, please let me know.

I don’t really have a dog but I’m happy to report that Open Court Resources is again being updated.Yes two weeks and several angry e-mails have gone by without a new file added to the site. My computer died, what can I say? Thanks to all of you who sent in resources during that period for your creativity and patience.

I am most excited about a couple of movies received during that time. I just hope I can put those online if the teachers have obtained release forms….I’m still waiting to find out.

If you still don’t see something you submitted on the site then it may be worth e-mailing me. I suspect I lose a file or two in the two hours in which my computer was not being backed up.

If you’re a techie keep reading…

I was running the site from a dual processor G5 which was three and a half years old. It had been going out for about a month. First I would have problems with the fan going crazy. I mean it would blow as loud as a truck and the computer would crash. I took it to the Apple Store where they ran tests that did not fix the problem. However, the problem seemed to fix itself two days later when it just went away. I did wisely purchase an external hard drive at that time and set up a backup plan to backup everything. And then one day the computer just shut off while I was using it and never went back on. Back to the Apple Store…they ran some more tests (like they pushed the power button and confirmed that it wasn’t working).

Surely I need a power cable but perhaps I also need a logic board. Well $1000 for an old computer is certainly more expensive than $1500 for a new computer.At the time of my original purchase an iMac was far inferior to a power mac. But now the iMac is a very close cousin of the Mac Pro and so I’m wondering I really need a Mac Pro. My biggest concern about the iMac is that I’m not going to like running files off of external drives. I’m worried they won’t be fast enough for video editing. But on the other hand, iMacs save desk space, are easier to carry, and $600-$900 less. I could buy a new computer sooner than if I bought a Mac Pro. It’s a complicated decision this time. I’m leaning toward an iMac but in the meantime I’ve adjusted to using my laptop and have managed to get the files off the old computer via an external drive enclosure.