Hidenwood Students Go Green!

Our fifth grade students will be running a new recycling program at Hidenwood Elementary this spring. Their teacher, Brian Lieberman, received a grant from the Kids In Need Foundation, an organization dedicated to funding creative, innovative learning projects. The students will distribute recycling bins around the school and will take responsibility for the collection of these materials. This will be the start of an exciting project-based authentic learning experience, during which students will not only study science and social studies, but also develop personal, social, and civil responsibility.

The project has already begun to bring students together. To get the project underway, students visited classrooms throughout the school to distribute recycling bins. After outlining the program, they fielded questions from their fellow students. I was so impressed with how confident and competent they sounded! Of course, our students could not contain their enthusiasm to join the project, and began collecting materials as soon as the bins were delivered. Thanks to the hard work of Mr. Lieberman and his students, Hidenwood Elementary will soon be a cleaner, greener place!

Diigo Webslides

I am presenting at the VEMA Spring Regional York Conference this week and am playing around with Diigo Webslides as a way of sharing the links for my presentation.




Problems so far:

• I'm not thrilled about the fact that everything is a cached version of the website. I am having trouble adding any Google applications to the slideshow -- they all show some message about the website timing out.
  
• I wish there were an easier way to rearrange the slides than going back into your Diigo list and clicking "move to top" or "move up." Drag and drop, please!
• YouTube video will not display.
  

I feel confident that the capability exists to create the tool I want, but I have yet to find it! I tried Flowgram and loved the set-up and options, but found it slow and unreliable. I also tried creating a stack in SearchMe, but could not find a way to drag and drop to rearrange slides had trouble finding the itty bitty button that lets you change the slide number order. I still think drag-and-drop functionality would be useful, too!

Check Out These Links -- Diigo 4.5.09