Don Leu and the members of The New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut have created a web site to document their work.

The New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut is a continually evolving consortium of professors, graduate research assistants, school districts, organizations, policy makers, teachers, and school leaders who seek to prepare students for the new learning and literacy skills required by information and communication technologies such as the Internet.

I have known and worked with Don since my days as a kindergarten teacher at Buckman Elementary and I look forward to learning more about the work of his team and following their New Literacies Team Blog…

Technorati Tags: New Literacies, Don Leu

While out raking leaves I got to thinking some more about the recent announcements from Flickr regarding printing. The blog post announcing the printing options also mentions a pilot program for businesses that allows them access to the Flickr API. They offer commercial and non-commercial licenses. What I would like to see is some type of web application that lets me create a book or poster from Flickr images by way of a PDF so that I can download the PDF and do the printing myself. I can imagine some type of interface similar to QOOP, but the end result is a downloadable PDF file. Is there something like this already out there?

Your Photos - not on Flickr!:

This past week, Flickr announced you can order prints to be delivered by mail, or pick them up at your local Target store for one hour printing. In addition to prints, you can also order posters and books made from your Flickr images via QOOP. stamps from Zazzle and DVD image backups from Englaze. I just made a poster with QOOP and it looks pretty nice. Now I need to do a better job of tagging my images so I can easily create posters and books based on tags…

I am very interested in the book making part of this. I am thinking we could use it to easily create books to document school and classroom events, field trips and classroom and school procedures. Am thinking a teacher could create a visual guide for substitute teachers, with text and images to explain classroom procedures and such. By arranging the images in sets in Flickr, adding appropriate descriptions and ordering the images in the proper sequence, you could create all guides of guides and manuals of school procedures and processes. I wonder if there is any mechanism for gathering the note information that can be embedded in Flickr images? I guess I’ll need to play around with this a bit more…

Technorati Tags: flickr, printing

From Your Living Room to the World, via Podcast:

The Sunday New York Times has an article by Anne Eisneberg outlining the equipment options for the production of a podcast.

Technorati Tags: Podcast equipment

Beth Kanter has a very good and detailed post about Joshual Schachter’s (the guy behind del.icio.us) recent presentation at the Berkman Center…

Last night I attended Berkman special evening event titled “Future of Tagging” with Joshua Schachter, founder of delicious, with David Weinberger, Berkman Fellow, who moderated.  (Schachter also gave a luncheon presentation and you can read Deborah Finn’s notes and David Weinberger’s live blogging of the session.)

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, Beth Kanter

Podcast Publishing With MovableType:

Alan Levine posts about using MoveableType as a Podcast publishing/posting engine. He has created a system of several templates available for download that allow you set up a system for cataloging podcasts, and producing RSS feeds associated with them.

Technorati Tags: levine, Alan Levine

NCLB and Value Added School Ratings:

Tom Hoffman points to a very interesting article in The Washington Monthly on NCLB assessments vs. other methods of school assessment. In this case value added assessment. The article points to the work done at Herbert Marcus Elementary School in Dallas and how it fares in a value added type of assessment compared to the requirements of NCLB. I’m finding that the writing of folks like Tom Hoffman and Tim Stahmer have a real resonance in the work I do as a principal and I enjoy reading their perspectives on ed policy.

Technorati Tags: hoffman, puppy, stahmer