I love my Baba Mila because... by Aliyah Smirnova :: bookr ::pimpampum

it was fun creating a book with Aliyah on bookr, flickr's new toy


We can use this book on Aliyah's 5th Birthday on September 23d.

Hello and Good Bye, RIO + 20

It was an incredible trip to Rio de Janeiro in June (12 through 24). My husband and I were delegates of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable development. Michael was with the group of Ramapo colleagues and students attending the sessions on environmental issues and I was representing the KDP headquarters on the issues of "Education for Sustainable development." I was attending the sessions and workshops pertaining to the topics of education, youth and environment, and the role of teachers in designing and implementing the Education for Sustainable development curriculum. I was absorbing the information at the sessions and with the help of my mobile devices (iPad and iPhone) I was immediately posting the fragments on Facebook, Youtube or twitter. Here is my Rio + 20 FB(Facebook)album with some of the pictures. I was impressed with the opening speech of a 12y.o girl from Dubai, Khekhashan Basu, at one of the sessions on education and sustainable world: (See the continuation and more videos on milasunshine channel). Here is a fragment of the opening speech of the chair of the session, called "Children as Agents of Change": I have learned about so many projects and programs that are implemented world-wide. When I was sitting at the session and discussing ideas with the delegates, I was thinking of my social studies methods class and what I can do to engage teacher candidates in some of them, to make them more environmentally conscious.

TESOL Highlights

Friday, March 30, fieldwork observations from 11:15 till 1:20. My Social Studies undergraduate students, groups 1 & 2 were giving their last lessons of their mini-unit plans in the 4th and 2nd grades. I was pleased with their creative ideas and the use of our course projects implemented in the fieldwork. I will discuss this more later but now... I was in a hurry to leave. Nellie and I wrote a proposal for the TESOL conference and we got a conformation later back in December, I think:
Dear EV Fair Presenter, Congratulations! Your proposal has been accepted for the Computer-Aided Language Learning Interest Section (CALL-IS) Electronic Village Fairs at TESOL in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 28-31, 2011.... We have attached a copy of the EV Fairs schedule to this message. Please check the date and time of your presentation in the schedule..
Our workshop was scheduled on Saturday and we were leaving Goshen, NY at the rush hour.
It took us 4 hours to get to Philadelphia. I met Nellie in the lobby. She came the night before and had already participated in a panel session.

We had a nice reunion dinner and discussed how we will run our workshop the next day.
Here is a link to our Presentation "Pedagogy of Collective Intelligence: Promoting Authentic Learning With Moodle for teachers (M4T) on IT4ALL"
It was a great success. We had a lot of interested people in using Moodle for teaching.

New Projects in the Social Studies Methods class

This year I added a new project to the course. It is a Book Trailer on one of the books for social studies reading. Teacher candidates were assigned to select a book connected to the Unit plan theme or to one of the grade level concepts and create a book trailer on it. There are a lot of resources, tutorials, presentations and youtube examples with book trailers designed by the authors of the books, teachers and students. Here is one of the presentations, Rock with Book Trailers I shared with my students. I am curious what will they come up with, what programs will they use? I recommended Animoto, MovieMaker, Photostory3, iMovie (Mac), Voicethread.

Test Your Geography Knowledge- USA

Test Your Geography Knowledge- USA:

this test has 50 questions and it is interactive. Using it regularly in class can develop students' understanding and knowledge of the states and their capitals. Try it out!

What country has the best education in the World?

View this youtube video and make your own conclusion.

A new Valuable Bookmarking Tool: Scoop.it

I joined Scoop.it: with the Topic "Liberating Students' Learning With Web 2.0."

and joined other educators' Scoop.It resources on the topics of the 21st century learning and teaching. I recommend teachers to keep current with new technologies via this site!