Number 22

Old military housing Angel Is.

View of the City from the top of Angel Is.
pictures courtesy R. Emerson

Bumpy road at Langley Middle. Still sorting out the workable and the not so much. Computing remains choppy particularly in regard to the online yearbook site where we are supposed to build the book; connection is slow and unpredictable. The theme of the book is as yet unestablished and in fact there are no real ideas although we have taken a couple of runs at brainstorming one up.

5 new computers have arrived for library and general use. We really need 10 times that number of new student workstations but all indications are that we are not going to be getting much until after the first of the year.

On the bright side new textbooks for English/Language Arts are here or almost here and they will provide some shiny new opportunities for reading and writing instruction once all hands figure out how to integrate them with existing resources and teaching styles.

My English 8, sometimes known as Humanities 8, students and I are finding our way into the American colonial era with the novel Johnny Tremain. We will be sharing personal Life Graphs this week in preparation for creating same for the main character in that story. We will also be selecting a non-fiction book this week to get another point of view on that time period. And we will be adding another post to the student blog either as a free write activity or a response to the reading, or maybe if we can find the time, both.

Speaking of blogs, the Publication class work group that is responsible for The LMS Weekly blog site may go live by Friday with their first edition. I will post the web address when the creators let me.

The other Publications groups, Video Yearbook and Video Productions, aka That LMS Friday Show are still struggling to find their footing and dealing with time and technology issues but the first Friday Show will happen this week one way or the other. Video Yearbook is of course a long term project with no product until May, hopefully they can finish before that and go on to something else by early next year. Publications really needs to be a two hour class and I am going to propose to the members that they need to put in some time outside of class, before school, at lunch or after school, if they want to produce quality work. Also as they learn the ropes of digital production they will get more efficient and faster.

Ramona, my daughter, who recently moved to San Francisco, did a little documentary project on Angel Island in SF Bay which is the destination for the LMS Adventure Education classes' Spring trip. We have pictures of the ferry from downtown out to the island and shots of the campgrounds, views of the city, old military installations (think Fort Casey with more sun) to get the kids excited about the prospect. Next she will try to figure out a public transport method of getting to the Point Reyes National Seashore from our basecamp on Angel Island. Or she will get a job and we will have to figure it out for ourselves.

Until next time...

Number 21

Langley Sea Wall (photo Marc Smith)

Highlights of the first (short) week of school, aka Thursday and Friday, September 4th and 5th:
Amidst a chaos of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time computers Bergquist's American Studies Blocks (1st and 2nd period, 5th and 6th period) were able, virtually to a man, to create both Gmail and Moodle (online course website) accounts. The kids, in other words, showed real problem solving skill given an authentic problem situation; the more savvy stepped up to assist the less technical, motivation was high all round, it was messy, it was real. Fun for the adults? Maybe not so much at first but as one learns to roll with it and sees the kids really engaged it felt better.

My two classes, English 8 and Publications, proved to be inhabited by a nice group of kids as was the circulating assessment of this class from their 7th grade year. In English we kicked off with a possibly over-the-top extended metaphor lesson involving a chainsaw and a fairly hefty section of Douglas Fir trunk. This activity is under study as to its viability and future use. We listened to a reading of the letter to parents about the expectations and curriculum of this class which was emailed later in the day to nearly all parents. Friday we began the construction of a hand-made journal for general use throughout the quarter (we will make a new one at the start of each quarter) and simultaneously wrote a reflection on the first day of school on one of the, as yet, unbound pages of said journal.

In Publications there was a fairly lengthy discussion of the nature of this production class and the implications of same for the members of the class. This class lives or dies based on real business requirements like profit and loss and the degree to which we can meet the needs and satisfy the interests of our market, the students of LMS. On Friday the class formed small groups and took photos of objects around the school after a short introduction to some basic rules of good photography. The class is large for the kind of multiple simultaneous activities envisioned, its a logistic challenge, and will demand levels of independence and responsibility not yet fully developed in this age group. We hope to break into a yearbook group, a video group, and a blog group very soon with a rotation through these during the year.

Implementation of tech levy funding for student workstations has not picked up much steam as yet but I think we will start to see a significant surge in actual machines in front of kids sometime this quarter and after; we need this to happen because even our newest workstations are now over 5 years old. The majority of these beasts work but they do not work well and with 25 to 30 kids in a room, believe me, you do not need to be hand-holding the computers.

The new library management software known as Destiny from the Follett Corporation is working very well and will be working a lot better when the students are uploaded to the system.
Great potential for searching the LMS library, and indeed all the district library collections, from school, home, anywhere you have an internet connection, (cell phone?). Kids or parents can finally really search for the right print or web resource easily. The software also enables a top ten list of most popular books (most checked out by students at each school), pictures of covers, complete records for each title, summaries and the actual text of the first several pages of many books, and many other features, probably that I will discover someday not too far in the future.
Now if we can get a whole bunch of shiny new books and get those kids into the system we will be rolling indeed.

Seismic assessment is in and, I think, available on the district web page somewhere. That should be interesting reading.

Adventure Ed is, I think, on track for Washington Coast Hike, Santa Barbara/Channel Islands, San Francisco/Point Reyes, Washington Coast again, with a Mount Pilchuck day hike in there somewhere, during the next two semesters.
Stay tuned.

Number 20

Point Reyes Lighthouse    (photo by Harold Davis)

As the 2007-2008 ends, preparation for the 2008-2009 school

year begins. The lower floor of the LMS two story will begin to get renovated this coming Monday with the removal of all the old floor coverings and the drying of the concrete slab below. Joe says the drying could take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks. The former copy room upstairs has been emptied and will be repurposed as a audio studio and student work module and will henceforth be officially known as The Tower. The other small high room formerly known as the apartment will be emptied next week and repurposed as another student workshop module and will be officially known as The Apartment. Access from The Apartment to what was formerly known as the roof will be restricted and the roof will be officially known as The Roof. As much as possible this modulization of student work areas with and without the inclusion of computer workstations will be replicated throughout the building. The two story itself will now be called, again, this is official, The Castle.

Moving beyond geography and mapping, the library will move to a new web-based software package for circulation, searching and cataloging called Destiny. This is a major leap forward in our ability to organize and provide access to the ten thousand books in the LMS Library and is very, very welcome.

The library will vigorously seek to freshen and improve its non-fiction in the coming year in support of the old/new approach of using longer coherent texts for research as a first choice with the internet as a secondary choice for research and a first choice for student publishing, communication and assessment (powered primarily by softwares like Moodle).

Professionally, the librarian will be working on an endorsement in middle level humanities through Antioch University Seattle. This little process should be done, with, hopefully, some help from higher powers, by December 31, 2008.

The librarian will also be teaching 3 classes next year: English 8, Publications and Computer 6. Thanks to an incredible richness of space these classes will be in the upper levels of The Castle and thus the library will always have the librarian close at hand to the Main Library and The Annex (both of which names are now official).

Very slightly farther out in the librarian's field of duty, the planning for the Adventure Education expeditions for next year has started particularly with an eye to a new destination for the large journey south; we hope to head down to Angel Island in the north part of San Francisco Bay in early 2009 for an experience that will include the great city itself (by direct ferry from the island) and the wild lands of The Point Reyes Peninsula.

Number 19

Please indulge cute video made with Mac OS X by one Dennis Liu

Well, pushing toward the end of the school year. Senioritis setting in among some 8th graders; no news there. Splitting the last of our budget in the library on books and digital things. Bought two camcorders of the very cheapest mini dv format, one at $150 one at $200. We like these machines.
Friday Show at 16 in which we are trying to focus on community around school namely Langley. So far we have had segments on Joe's Island Music and the early days at The Clyde. One constant problem seems to be the inadvertent overwriting of one bit of video tape by another bit; this is something that hopefully will be alleviated by a new storage format like flash in the cameras we buy next. Distribution on shows to classroom is a bit primitive and spotty because it is done with physical media (DVD's) and on foot (mine).
Looking to get Moodling soon and put materials for next year's Publications and other classes online. Difficulties with account setup at ESD right now.
Comic Life activities in Computer 6 going well. We will be moving on to Garageband and iMovie for the bulk of the rest of the quarter. Should try to incorporate Comic Life page exports into iMovie. Kids are also spontaneously learning Pencil (animation program) in free time. Watching a few TED presentations and 2001 A Space Odyssey as well.
Switching to new software for library management which will be all web based and is to be hosted remotely at ESD. First meeting with company reps next Tuesday switch over in June and then formal two day training.
Planning next year to continue to push non-fiction books of all topics into students hands by enlisting subject area teachers and refreshing non-fiction collection.
Planning for The Spring '08 Coast Campaign June 7-11 is finalized; I will be marching from the North with the Second Division under Major General Scoles, Bergquist's and his Army of the South will deploy at Rialta with Colonel Sewell and Colonel Diers and move North to a rendezvous at Chilean Memorial on the morning of the 10th of June. Victory will be ours!

Number 18

Coast Starlight coming to take us home. March 2008

A cold day in Spring; the first day of WASLing; a chance to do things that are not normally easy to find the time to do.

Two 10 day expeditions down the West Coast by rail and bus to Southern California and out to Channel Islands National Park by boat in the past three months with Bergquist's Adventure Education class and both exceptional in every way; a fine and beautiful way to bring balance to the public school experience.

Non-fiction science books offered out to Zisette's 7th grade science students and Hoelting's 8th grade students as extra credit self-selected opportunity. Many new science titles purchased specifically for these programs this year and last. Similar opportunity created for Bergquist's American Studies class with a large selection of non-fiction (some historical fiction as well) titles both from our library and from Sno-Isle.

New mini-dv format video camera bought from returned refurbished shelf at Circuit City for $170.00. I took same on California Santa Cruz Island Expedition in March and found the li machine to be a joy to carry and use. Hoping to get similar deal on another one soon or purchase a new Canon HS100 flash based vid camera when it is released in May.

Yearbook will be done as soon as Tessa and Vica take pictures of first official track practice this afternoon and place these on Track 2 page spread on Jostens' web site.

Video yearbook (dvd insert in print yrbk) looks like it will happen now that I have seen and briefly used dvd duplicator machine and Publications video yearbook workers are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

That LMS Friday Show is at number 12 and is stumbling along nicely thanks to the efforts of John, Emily and Emma, and assorted up-and-comers now free of yearbook chores.

Last quarter Computer 6 class is off to a good start. We watched a TED conference presentation by Jeff Han on a new multi-touch interface for a computer that does away with a physical keyboard and mouse. I saw some happy, amazed, maybe a little awestruck, looks from the 6th graders watching, which was the point. Afterward, they all responded with a short TextEdit document saved to their server folders. I will try to incorporate some sort or stimulating technology preview often and have kids do short written reflections. Later these semi frequent writings can be illustrated and compiled into a Keynote presentation and shared with the next class.

Number 17

Sunset Santa Cruz Island January 13th 2008 A Q Viers Photo

Progress is happening. Several hundreds of dollars have been spent to increase and update the library's multicultural fiction collection used extensively by 7th grade social studies classes. American Studies has been given sets of classic literature; primarily Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and H. G. Wells "The Time Machine". A grant to cover a substantial portion of the cost of a new workstation for the library annex has come from the PTSA (following last year's even larger grant for a similar machine). These machines are a huge boost to the Publication classes' efforts to complete the first-ever video yearbook and the best-ever 8th grade graduation movie.
PTSA, we appreciate your support.

Beyond great cash the PTSA is also providing volunteer library supervisors so we can keep the facility open during 6, 7 and 8th grade lunch time Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This is a good thing, especially when it is rainy and cold out.
The new PTSA hardware is also making it faster and easier to produce That LMS Friday Show which is now at show number 8. This Publication class production is distributed on DVD's to 7 or 8 classrooms across the grade levels. The compilation of the show segments and the burning of the disks would have been slow to the point of impracticality without the upgraded workstations.

My 6th grade class is currently doing a survey of the Digital Learning Commons web site and each student is taking a resource and reporting out to class on that resource using keynote as a presentation support. These presentations should occupy the class for all of this week if the past autobiographical keynotes are an accurate guide.

Number 16

An object lesson for the blogger with less than optimal concentration; this morning, with the intention of deleting an old English 8 class blog which was no longer needed, I deleted instead the LMS Library blog and 2 years of posts.
Turns out it was a day for endings of which this was trivial in comparison.
So with the Bergquistians Zorking and the Rat Pack Xmas album playing in the background I bid goodbye to all that history and start over.
We have finally got a library budget and hope to be purchasing some shiny new books and some computer stuff.
Happy Holidays