I hear America singing

Animoto is an engaging online tool which could be used in the classroom to create a visual/audio slideshow such as book trailers and poetry presentations. I would like to collaborate with a Social Studies teacher using Animoto for digital storytelling focusing on themes such as Change or Colonization. I found Animoto to have some easy features such as uploading photos and music. It is limited in the amount of text one can use. Therefore I took a screen shot of my Works Cited page, copied it into Paint and then uploaded it as a photo.

Buergenthal

3 Bai Juyi Mashups

Image Chef ~ www.imagechef.com; Big Huge Labs ~ www.bighugelabs.com; Graffiti Creator ~ www.satisfaction.com/graffiti-creator/

2 Flickr Mashups

2 mashups of Mary Todd Lincoln using Flickr:

A Dog's Purpose

W. Bruce Cameron's novel A Dog's Purpose: A Novel for Humans follows the lives of one dog as it tries to understand the purpose of its being. As readers we circle back to the meaning of Bailey's life whose sole purpose was to unequivocally love and protect his boy. Each life gave the dog a lesson that followed him into the next life which ultimately brings him back to the fulfillment of his purpose.

How wonderful to think that we might share different stages of our life with an animal that has become bonded to us by love. I recall at 45 the moment I picked Max up as a puppy, I loved him. It surprised me as I always saw myself as a cat owner. It wasn't until years later when I found an old picture of myself at 3 with Poochie that I thought how much these two dogs are alike.

Cameron's novel brings home a lesson to all of us. Every living creature, great and small, should be treated with grace.

Battle Hymn

Book Review: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

I liked this book. Chua's humor is self-deprecating and witty, something all parents need from time to time regardless of their parenting style. It is survival mode for intense situations in child-rearing. Yes, I found her parenting excessive but then few of us raise 13-year-old Carnegie pianists. The question is not even whether we want to or not. It is more about raising our children with intention and knowing when to adapt. Child raising is about relationships, parent to child, child to sibli...moreI liked this book. Chua's humor is self-deprecating and witty, something all parents need from time to time regardless of their parenting style. It is survival mode for intense situations in child-rearing. Yes, I found her parenting excessive but then few of us raise 13-year-old Carnegie pianists. The question is not even whether we want to or not. It is more about raising our children with intention and knowing when to adapt. Child raising is about relationships, parent to child, child to sibling. We need to give the best of ourselves to our children but not allow our best to cripple them but to empower them. It's a tight-rope. And sometimes we don't know which we have achieved.

The Shallows

A Teacher Librarian from South Carolina on LM_NET reviewed Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. She states, "It explains in understandable terms the brain research that has revealed the plasticity of our brains and the subtle effect computer and internet use have on the way the human brain functions. By comparison, it explains how 'the book' altered the brains of our predecessors as did other 'intellectual tools' like the map and the clock. While the author isn't sounding the warning that we are losing our minds as we allow the computer (internet) to take over many of our search/research decisions, he does make clear that we need to carefully evaluate this 'tool' and use it wisely. We alter the chemical flows in our synapses and change our brains. And when we hand down our habits of thought to our children, through the examples we set, the schooling we provide, and the media we use, we hand down as well the modifications in the structure of our brains.

By freeing us from the struggle of decoding text, the form that writing came to take on a page of parchment or paper enabled us to become deep readers, to turn our attention, and our brain power, to the interpretation of meaning. With writing on the screen...we read if anything faster than ever but we are no longer guided toward a deep personally constructed understanding of the text's connotations. Instead we're hurried off toward another bit of related information and then another and another. The strip-mining of 'relevant content' replaces the slow excavation of meaning...the more we use the web, the more we train our brain to be distracted--to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering."