Teaching Research Skills to Fifth and Sixth Graders

I teach fifth and sixth graders once a week a class on research and study skills. We meet in the school’s computer lab. Lately, I have been hooked on showing kids how to find information outside of the traditional “Google search.”

I love how kids know how to “google,” but they typically don’t know how to go deeper than the first page results of a search engine. So I have introduced them to Britannica School.

So, you don’t have to dust off those old copies of Encyclopedia Britannica. In the State of New York, residents with a computer and access to the Internet can get their hands on of Britannica School online. In our weekly and bi-weekly Research classes, kids have accessed the site through NOVELNY (New York Online Electronic Library). After creating individual accounts, we explored the online database’s many features - including full-text articles, images, and fun, engaging videos. It is expert content right at our fingertips - and students can research by adding materials to a digital folder. Look out world! Life-long learners are out and about.

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Technology in the Classroom: How to Create a Digital Editable Document with Google Docs for You and Your Students

I made this Greek Mythology resource shareable and editable!

I like to share with my students and I recently noticed that my digital file type of choice are PDFs and I most-often work with Google Docs when creating. However:

1. PDFs are static and it is hard to edit them
2. A Google Doc is editable; but, how can I share what I have created but still keep the integrity of my originals?

Here's what I have done (by following a simple Google hack)

Re-Post: Instagram Selfie

When in doubt make a selfie.

greigroselli

It’s a world of images. Walter Benjamin is turning in his grave.
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#scholar #cinephilecommunity #poet #filmbuff #cinephile#mizo #culturalcritic #moviereviews #whattowatch #culture#reviews #shillong #movies #indigenous via stonesoferasmus.com

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On Carnival Wins, the Ephemeral Nature of Childhood Toys, and Short-Term Goals: It ain't pretty!

Who can relate? I can!

I sometimes wish I could pull a tape of tickets out of a machine and win. Win big. Don't you? It's an analogy. The analogy is something like this. Just like playing games at the arcade hall will garner you tickets (that win big!), once you go home you put the toy away; you forget about it. How many carnival game toys have you won and treasured? None. But I bet when you won that damn thing you were as hot as dry ice. You were stone cold happy. Winning a stuffed bear at the shoot out booth or scoring some plastic dinosaur from the crane game made you goofy happy. And you loved it. Sure. I remember going to the parish fair (we call state counties parishes in Louisiana) and feeling like I had won it all when my dad gave me a crisp twenty dollar bill and instructed me to play some games. I won a bouncy ball and a stuffed lizard. It was euphoric. I was so mad crazy over winning games I remember once my aunt took me to the arcade with my brother and we spent way too much money playing Smash TV. Quarters into tokens. Tokens add up. So do quarters. I took a recent troupe of students (I am a teacher) on an end-of-the-year trip to Dave & Busters. Those kids were as happy as the proverbial pigs in slop with their hard-earned won trophies. Plastic guns; plasticine bears; laughy taffy; yo-yos and other knick-knacks and treasuries that sure did seem like treasuries to them. I was just happy that they were serving lunch for the adults too; we got to eat crap-food on a Tuesday. Priceless.

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Video Repost: Braden Gives His Bubblegum Book Report in Season One of the Mickey Mouse Club Reboot (circa 1990s)

I was never a fan of the Mickey Mouse Club reboot on the Disney Channel - mainly, because I am not sure if we had the Disney Channel in my house or not (I honestly cannot remember). However, I came upon this trite little gem - it's a cute little skit - and it reminds me of the innocence I recall from circa 1990s television craziness. I cannot put my finger on it - but television in the 1990s was just plain cotton candy madness. It was sweet - and totally unreeled from any kind of substantial aesthetic. I love how the above skit takes place on a stage with a live audience - kind of like how Nickelodeon did its shows back in the day - and a kind of tween version of Saturday Night Live. Now. I love how the girl gives her sterling report on Moby Dick. Great job. But why does she give an apple for the teacher - isn't that a bribe? And then comes Braden's report - one of the stars of the early reboot days of The Mickey Mouse Club. His report rings true for me - because I can remember a classmate pulled a similar stunt in a class once. He tried to give a class report on one of the elements of the periodic table and he passed out a brochure he had made with the name of the element printed on it - he was so proud of his ersatz report that I remember it still to this day. I guess it is the same for our man Braden. I would remember his report - and he gives it with such Americana teen bravado that I was surprised that the teacher was scowling. And in a kind of teen rebellion-cum-audience mob effect - the live action crowd is totally into it. Go Braden! A+

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Reflection: Another Year Goes Away and a New Year Begins

Sometimes life is like a circle. I could go on and give examples - and I will - but I feel like E.B. White did it best in an essay he wrote about circus performers.
      It’s been a while since I closely read the essay but I remember its thesis poignantly. Time is like a circle. White focuses his writing on one performer specifically who takes command of the circus ring. He notices she is in counterbalance to another performer, older, who is also in the ring. White imagines the younger performer is at the crest of her career, illuminating and graceful yet the other performer is also she - less graceful and aging. That’s what I remember. White manages to place an idea of recurrence - of repeating and twinning that resonates with me even now. Perhaps it’s because it’s the beginning of a new year - 2019 and I just recently celebrated a birthday. In a year from now, I’ll celebrate forty years on earth. I’ve been out of school long enough to miss it and I’ve been working just long enough to see myself getting better at what I do - but I can see my older, aged twin on the other side of the circle. He waves at me but I can’t figure out if he’s happy or not.  If I zoom in too much on the daily details of my life it’s all a bunch of minutiae - picking up the trash, sipping a cup of coffee, placing dirty clothes in the hamper. And if I zoom out a bit more - like in that book - where each page is a zoom-out or zoom in of the universe - I see bigger picture things like how much time I spent teaching or how much time I spent writing. And if I zoom out even further I see myself as a generation among generations, and further out too I’m a speck - not even significant. Yet this is what amazes me about human beings. We are persistent in our urgency to slam into the earth some smattering of meaning. And it feels worth it when I’m introspective and desperate when I’m barraged by life’s demands - yet it’s a life. At the start again. So - happy New Year.

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Photo: Street Scene from Queens (My Favorite Instagram Pic from 2018)

I took this photo in the Summer of '18 at the Jackson Heights Queens Pride Parade.

So. I went through my Instagram profile and chose this photograph (above) as my favorite from 2018. Since it was Gay Pride Day in Queens on the day I took this picture, I was strutting my stuff on the Avenue taking pictures of anyone who’d say “yes”. I must have taken like thirty photos on my phone. I like this picture because it’s instantly noticeable as a New York scene: notice the “A” Health Inspector sign in the window of the restaurant in the background. If you look closely the boy is wearing a Superman t-shirt - and he serves as the focus of the image. I wonder what he’s eating - crackers or chips? The woman looks happy. And of course - there’s a bunch of people-moving going on. It was a busy day but oddly this photograph marks the day as peaceful and I’m grateful I was able to capture some of it on my digital camera.

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