The Fabulous Mural Adorning the Entrance to the Life Arts Wing

I've been meaning to post about this wonderful piece of art work that was in the making for the entire school year 2010~2011, but it's taken until now, the start of another school year, to get it done. Rather than recreate the wheel, I am pasting the content of the article that our own, wonderful art teacher, Mrs. Frank, wrote about the project, and then I'll put in several photos showing the progression.

Art News from Mrs. Frank

When students walk down the long hallway leading to the art room, they are greeted by a colorful and vibrant wall sized ceramic tile mural entitled

“Express Yourself.”

8th grade art elective classes recently completed work on a yearlong project. The students made clay tiles by hand and created figures. This is an activity which expresses their individuality and uniqueness. Some examples of tiles include reading, singing, playing guitar, baking, dancing, and playing sports. Some figures are ‘stepping outside the box,’ and oneis an astronaut flying in space. One student said her dream was to ‘paint the sky’ and she created her figure holding a paintbrush with swirls of paint in the night sky.

Students learned about the artist Keith Haring, and modeled their work in his style of bold lines, vivid colors and active figures in motion. Haring was known for his subway drawings, murals, and strong messages of life, love and unity.

This art work was funded by a $1,000 School Arts Mini Grant from the Jamie Hulley Arts Foundation. I would like to thank Judy Primavera for her encouragement and support throughout this project.

When I walk down the hallway to my room seeing this wall of color just makes me smile. I’m so proud of my students!

My blog is visible again!

Well, that was scary. I have put a lot of time and energy into this blog even though I don't post everyday, and when I kept getting the error message that the page could not be displayed, it was disconcerting. I have learned from my son to check the forums when I'm having a problem, and that is just what I did. Come to find out there was a post from another blogger with the exact same problem. One of the responders told her to go to her layout tab in the dashboard of her blog and see if she had the blogrolling gadget because that was causing problems. I followed the advice, found the offending gadget and removed it, and Voila! my blog was visible again. So, if anyone has a problem with a piece of software or a driver for one of the devices hooked to their computers, or trouble with an online application, go to the forums and check for solutions. It is not always as easy as this fix, but it's a start.

Help. My page won't display.

I don't know why, but I'm getting an error message. My page displays and then says it can't be displayed . Why?

Featured Teacher Me! Really!

On Saturday, August 27, 2011, I was honored to be the featured teacher guest on the weekly Classroom 2.0 webinar which airs most every Saturday at noon EST. I have been corresponding with one of the founders and moderators of the site, Peggy George. She and a number of other fabulous educators (including but not limited to Kim Caise, Lorna Costantini, and Tammy Moore) host a one to one and a half hour webinar "dedicated to supporting teachers with resources and practical suggestions for incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into their teaching and learning."
Right at the end of the school year, Peggy invited me to share my story on one of the August sessions. Just a week prior, our own Megan Wilson (iPodsibilities), a special ed teacher in Orange was the special guest, and she taught the audience how to create eBooks. I was actually terrified to accept but equally terrified of passing up the chance to share my simple story of me as an evolving teacher who in small ways, combined with the rest of our wonderful teaching staff, has attempted to bring our school into 21st Century Learning. As I said in a disclaimer, there are hundreds of other technology integration teachers who are way more advanced than I am who could be telling their stories, but I would do my best to offer something of worth to other teachers. I hope I did that. Below is a screen shot of the intro about me and a link to the recording and all the wonderful links that the organizers, the participants in the chat, and I added to the blog.

http://live.classroom20.com/1/post/2011/08/featured-teacher-carolyn-stanley.html#comments


Make sure to click on the link to the LiveBinder in the resources list. There are also tabs in the Classroom 2.0 LiveBinder to previous shows - including Megan's.

Wonderful Resources on SlideShare.net

If you haven't looked at the site, SlideShare.net, it's worth some investigation time. Educators find it particularly useful because they can upload a slide presentation they have created and then narrate the slides to share with other folks all over the world.
Since our district is moving to Google Apps for Education district wide- it's been piloted at the middle schools for the past 2.5 years- I thought this slideshare presentation by Liat Rothfeld would be of interest in that it gives a nice overview of Google Docs and Google presentations.  In it she also covers how to set up a personal Google account -which is optional. Users of amityschools.org will have accounts already established for them.
I have copied the embed code for the presentation, so enjoy.

How to Use Google Docs - Part 1

View another webinar from lrothfeld

Discovery Education Summer School - what a resource!

I can't believe it, but I actually attended every session of DEN summer school (live, interactive webinars) that ran from Monday, August 1 through Thursday, August 4. Each of the sessions was rich with resources and advice to help us become better practitioners who help students to discover the excitement of learning and the satisfaction that can be derived in telling and sharing their stories.
Of course, many of the sessions went a a breakneck pace, and I found it hard to keep up. Thankfully, the magnificent Porter Palmer kept everything on track and made sure that all of the sessions were recorded, so we (and others who missed the live presentations) could go back at our leisure and sample segments we wanted to review. The link to the archives was just posted recently: link to DE Summer School recorded sessions
Those were lovely summer days, and being tied to my laptop for 4 hours was a bit of a challenge. I even suggested to Porter that they need to build in a little time for "potty breaks." However, the new things I learned really made me excited to go back to school in a few weeks rather than dreading it. Also, the fact that I was able to set up my laptop on a table at the back of my garage, which is all screened in and looks out onto the back yard, really helped the experience.

In a future post, I intend to highlight four or five of the resources I learned about and then found the time to explore.
In the meantime, my thanks goes out to all the wonderful educators at DE for their tireless work in helping us become better teachers and learners and for offering such exciting resources for our students.
Also, thanks so much to our district for subscribing the Discovery Education so that all of our staff and students have access to thousands and thousands of exciting resources to use on personal leaning adventures.
Finally, I understand that our Middle School Science subscription (an add-on to DE paid for by the State of CT for all middle schools in CT) will be expiring in June of 2012. I know for a fact that our science teachers use this resource with their students and think it's terrific, so we all need to petition the state to extend the subscription.

The Last Day of School for Students and "The Wave"

It has been a tradition for a number of years to wave the buses, carrying all of our students off to summer vacation joys, out of the parking lot. We broke with tradition this year in a couple of ways. Instead of standing on the pavement outside the lower entrance to the school, we went over to the green underneath the gigantic tree. Also, other years I had simply taken a number of still shots to commemorate the event, but the iPad makes capturing video so easy that I decided to film the event. Sara Frank kindly took some still shots. You'll see her in the video. I chose a couple of the still shots to display on our web page, but I uploaded the video from the iPad to my YouTube account, and I will embed it in my blog. I really like having the video - the sound and the motion capture the exciting yet bittersweet event far better than the still shots ever could. In all, the school year 2010~2011 was a very successful year for students and staff alike, and I heard a number of 8th graders saying how much they would miss the middle school and all of their teachers. That speaks volumes. Enjoy - and have a great summer!

Some times paper and pencil, crayons, markers, etc. can be the technology of choice

The 7th grade English classes recently read Seed Folks by Paul Fleishman. Not only is the book a wonderful story of how a community garden enriches the lives of all its participants, but the book is also rich in imagery. Each year, the students are asked to pick out a favorite simile or metaphor to illustrate. I have wanted to capture some of these student creations for years, and I finally got a chance. Of course, the technology of the scanner and the blog are what enables these wonderful creations to be shared with a wider audience. Enjoy them.

and this last one is my favorite:

Perfection on Wheels - brought to Bethany MS by Character Ed Committee

I am backtracking a bit, but on Friday, May 13, our Character Ed Committee with sponsorship from Woodbridge Youth Services and the Town of Bethany secured Perfection on Wheels, a BMX stunt team to perform for our students. Besides putting on a terrific show, they also included a strong message about how important it is to build good character including qualities of being truthful, trustworthy, responsible, and caring for others.
This video was captured on the iPad2, edited in iMovie on the iPad, and uploaded to our YouTube channel from the iPad. It is truly a remarkable video machine. I will tell you that it did take me a number of hours to edit down over 20 minutes of video to around 12 minutes, but I think the result is worth it. Enjoy.

A Memorial Day Observance

In order to impress on students the real reason for the 3-day holiday besides the celebration of the coming of summer, an observance was planned during homeroom time. Students and staff met around the flagpole in the front of the school for a very fitting assembly. The video embedded here captured this nice moment.

The video was recorded and edited on the iPad and uploaded directly to our amsbchannel from the iPad.