Mining for Treasures Archives: Language
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23 September 2008
Join the Fun – Online Book Groups
Do you want to take the leap into a personal learning network, but not sure which one is right for you? Why don’t you think about joining an online book group. There are two that I would like to highlight for you.
The first can be found at Teacher Places Book Clubs. In the past, this group has discussed Gardner’s FIve MInds for the Future, Medina’s Brain Rules, and Christenson’s Disruptive Class, all books which have had a huge impact on my thinking and understanding. They just have released there fall lineup, which looks extremely impressive as well:
First up is Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism. Publishers Weekly says of the book:
Weighing in on a discourse that includes both visions of “clashing civilizations” and often equally misguided cultural relativism, Ghana-born Princeton philosopher Appiah reclaims a tradition of creative exchange and imaginative engagement across lines of difference.
Next is Beverly Tatum’s Can We Talk About Race? The Boston Globe writes about this book:
A provocative and important book . . . What Tatum seeks to do above all is trigger sometimes challenging discussions about race, and infuse those discussions with a reality-based focus on how race affects us all. Her latest book does that beautifully, asking tough questions, and patiently, inclusively seeking answers.
Finally, for December, we are going to tackle Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. The review from Publisher’s Weekly says:
Manjoo rounds out his analysis by examining the workings of “partisan news realities,” and he points out that the first casualty in these truth wars is a basic human and civic need: trust. Though several of the author’s ideas are repetitiously threaded through his narrative, Manjoo has produced an engaging, illustrative look at the dangers of living in an oversaturated media world.
All three books look to address key issues that we, as a community of colleagues and educators, need to engage if we are to help our students, our schools, and our communities to navigate a world where divisiveness and sophistry appear to reign.
Additionally, a group of teachers at Stevenson High School have begun a year-long book study on Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics. This book talks about how collaboration in the business place is beginning to change the way business is done. The focus of this group is to talk about how the ideas apply to education.
We have been invited to participate if you would like the schedule for the reading is not cumbersome. It is:
Timeline:
9/24 Read Intro through pg. 64 (Ch. 1 & 2)
11/5 Read pgs. 65 – 124 (Ch. 3 & 4)
1/21 Read pgs. 124-182 (Ch. 5 & 6)
2/4 Read pgs. 183-238 (Ch. 7 & 
3/18 Read pgs. 239-287 (Ch. 9 & 10)
4/30 Read pgs. 288-315 (Ch. 11)
To participate in the conversation, visit the following blog – http://wikinomics-book-study.blogspot.com/
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17 October 2007
Top Language Web 2.0 Tools
I am highlighting a group of tools that I have found on a blog post by Richard MacManus, who writes a blog called the Read/Write Web. In a a post called the top Spanish Web 2.0 Apps from August 2006, he highlights the following applications which I think may have application in our classrooms:
Tagzania
– a geomapping site with excellent features; you can create your own “geoposts” and it automatically produces a KML file of your posts for Google Earth. Here is Eduardo’s account and the KML of his videos (in the form of a travel videoblog). On this site, there are a number of French Resources
Podcasts: Comunicandoand Triunfa en internet
QDQ has pictures of thousands of buildings in Spain, so you can search for an address and see what the building looks like (type Castellana 2 for instance in the street address in Madrid).
From this post, here is an interesting fact about Spanish Web Tools:
An interesting fact about Spain’s web apps is that most sites are presented with multilingual engines. Eduardo told me that Spanish Web entrepreneurs think that Spanish-only sites have a limited audience – “only 300 million people or so” (!) – so a lot of them create multilingual apps.
There are other applications not highlighted here that you can take a look at yourself.
