Geno's!!

Liberty Bell & Dukw tour

Yesterday we went back down to Independence Hall National Park to view the Liberty Bell.  The line to see it, was well, you get the idea:

 The building that they have it in explains the creation, purpose, care for, history and the popularity of the Liberty Bell.  Once you get inside the building you have plenty of room to move around, read the artifacts, and gain an appreciation for the bell.  At the end sits the bell.

After the Liberty Bell, we went on a Dukw tour of Philly.  We rode in a Dukw, which is an amphibious vehicle, our driver took us around Philly taking us around the famous places, and then splash into the Delaware River.  

We trolled around the Delaware for awhile, but I did get a picture of the most decorated battleship in the Navy, the USS New Jersey

Independence Hall

Mr. Bell in front of Independence Hall!  You can see this was before they had set up for the concert on July 3rd and the 4th of July festivities! 

Philly pops at Independence Hall!!  Great live concert in front of Independence Hall featuring the Philadelphia Pops, very cool, as they played and sang only American written music to stay with the ideal of an American celebration.  They had Chestnut street block off in front of the Hall and then set up chairs on the lawn space between the Hall and the Visitors Center on Market Street.  Thankfully it was a cooler evening with a slight breeze, as the turn out for the concert was huge with many people bringing their lawnchairs, blankets, picnic baskets, and the like to enjoy the evening.

Valley Forge

Today we drove out to Valley Forge, which really isn't that far from Philadelphia.  I guess if I would have read up a little about it, that would have made complete sense.  General Washington wanted a place where he could watch the British in Philadelphia, yet far enough from any surprise attack.  So much for calling myself a history teacher!

Here is a recreation of the huts on the south line of defenses.

This is a picture of the inside of one of the huts that would resemble what the soldiers at Valley Forge would have had.

Here is Brent & I with a re-enactor and his 1772 Brown Bass Musket, pretty cool. He was talking about how to load, shoot, & carry one.  

Here is Washington's house that he stayed at while at Valley Forge.  It's actually pretty big and the Park ranger said that most of the renovation on the house has just been the wood floors and some windows.  Pretty good for a house pushing 250 years!

That's me in the doorway!

They were doing a dig behind the house, looking for Revolutionary War artifacts, while we were there, they showed us a musket ball that had yet to be fired.  

Christ Church & Grounds, Franklin Square, & Betsy Ross's House

We then went to Christ's Church, which has stood & served the people of Philadelphia since the times of Ben Franklin and George Washington, which their two families attended.  It is a beautiful church.

Yesterday, we spent time down around Independence National Park.  Since it was July 1st, there were already people re-enacting the colonial times.  A camp was being set up in front of the National Constitution Center.  Here is a picture of two of them:

We also viewed the burial grounds of the church.  Christ Church had seven men who signed the Declaration of Independence attend their church and then were buried on their grounds.

Betsy Ross House:
We then walked to Betsy Ross's House, there was lots going on with the 4th of July weekend, so we just walked around the ground and took a few pics.

Franklin Square:

Franklin Square houses the Franklin post office, the print shop and apartments that Franklin built.  His actual house was demolished by his grandchildren to improve the property.  It is pretty cool to see the interior of the walls and how the building was built:

The darker areas are where the flus for the chimneys were & you can see where the floor joints were fastened to the walls.  Below is the a good representation of the print shop that one can see, the tools used, and we were actually able to watch the National Parks official show us how the printer works.

Here you can see the tools used to binding the books produced back in colonial times:

Gettysburg!

148 years ago today, one of the greatest battles of the Civil War began, accidentally really, at the quiet town of Gettysburg.  That was the destination of yesterday's travels.  We began our morning at 7:00 walking to pick up our rental that we would drive the 3 hours to Gettysburg.

We were exceedingly happy because they upgraded our vehicle to a SUV due to that certain features of it were broken and it was not suitable for Brent or I.

Our first stop in Gettysburg was naturally the  Tavern at the Farnsworth House, where one can see Brent standing next to the brick wall where one can see dozens of bullet holes in the brick:

We decided that since it was close to noon, that we should just have lunch before heading to downtown Gettysburg.  We walked around the square and even got a picture taken with good ole Abe:

We then headed to the visitors center, went through the museum, which is excellent, and then raided the bookstore!  

After going through the visitors center, we took the auto tour of the battlefield.  It took us 3 hours to drive the tour and take pics.  We even went to a few places even Frauen hadn't been too! Here's just a few pics from the drive:

Virginia Memorial

Devil's Den:

Phillies & Red Sox

Since the ISTE conference is over, and our trip is roughly half over, we thought it would be cool to take in a Phillies game.  It was a beautiful night and even though our seats were up there, it was still fun!

The Phillies won 2-1.  What a beautiful night!

Wednesday morning at ISTE

This morning I went to two good sessions, one by Will Richardson & Rob Mancanbelli, & the other by Tammy Worcester.  Will & Rob talked about how to deal with those in your school who are reluctant to start using ed tech by addressing the "Yeah, but..." arguments that others provide.  They stated that research shows that by just providing a rational counter to their arguments, that most people (10%) will change their behavior.  However, they showed that if you address their social/emotional needs concerning the issue that up to 72% of the people were willing to change.  Very good information.  

Tammy Worcester spent the session talking about how to use Google Docs for projects in the classroom, many good ideas were presented.  I liked the idea about using Google Earth to build virtual maps of each unit where students can add placemarks for major people, events, and other important locations.  You can view her site here: Tammy's Technology Tips for Teachers.

Alan November

I went to Alan November's session yesterday afternoon.  I have heard him speak before and he delivered again.  One of the things that I think draws a lot of people to Alan is that one can truly tell when they listen to him that he is passionate about students & their learning.  That was again the focus of today's discussion.  he noted how important it is for students to be connected to the work they are doing, that they feel as if what they are producing is helping others, not just for their own grade.  He talked about having students create online tutorials for other students.  He also talked about giving students specific jobs while discussing topics in class that way there is a class collection of notes/links/images/own thoughts.  Great job Alan.

Digital Storytelling

Interesting session by Shelly Terrell discussing the use of mobile devices to help enhance student learning.  Although much of it was targeted at the elementary level, there were some useful items.  She discuss the use of mobile devices in the class room, especially use of Ipod touches and smart phones.  Gave several examples of apps and programs that kids can use for various learning projects.  There were ones she used for targeting enhanced learning for ELL students at the elementary level.

Tuesday Morning at ISTE

Our keynote was Dr. Steven Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People & The Leader of Me.  He talked about how we need to teach students about principles, those ideas that will help them all their life, not necessarily just about content.  Although Dr. Covey wasn't present, he was virtually present online as he talked about his research and how it can applied to schools.

I also went to a session by Adam Bellows, titled The Tech Commandments: 10 Ways to Revitalize Educations with Technology. It was very poor, all he did was rant about what there is to rant about in relation to the use of technology in education.  He provided NO ways to revitalize education.  I will not attend another session by him. Unfortunately, I left early so I could spend time in the exhibition hall instead.

Then I went to a session about curation & differentiated learning and how technology helped this process, led by Katie Morrow of O'Neill, NE.  The session was very interesting and made me wonder about what the role of teacher is going to be now that the web & the ability to link to various sources of content is very easy.  The talked about the idea of curation, which is "the process of establish and developing long term repositories of digital assets for current and future reference," according to the presenters.  They presented a lot of other resources on how to curate websites, tweets, images, and other digital content.

Mash-ups in the Classroom

This was a BYOL session (bring your own laptop)!  Nice little session, as the presenters gave several tools(mostly free) that a teacher has access too in the classroom.  The first one was www.dragontape.com, which is a very interesting web site that allows the user the possibility of mixing and matching different videos and songs or both.  You can clip videos from youtube and songs from sound cloud for example and mix the two together on this website and then either link an url or embed it on your on website.  Thought this would be a cool thing to use when pieces together various history videos that would allow me to keep the key content within the video, but have them from several sources.

Overall a very good session this morning!

Google Apps Session

So I went to a Google Apps session yesterday afternoon hoping that I would learn something new about Google Apps for school, however, I was disappointed.  Those of us at Lexington Public Schools who use Google Apps all the time pretty much know everything that they presented.  The only cool idea that I took from there was that they have a student-led group that was responsible for teaching the teachers how to use Google Apps.  Finally, a good idea to take back.  We've talked about doing this, but I think to go fully Google, this would be the best way.

Afternoon Session!

A 45-minute Social Studies Makeover! 


Useful session full of helpful tips and tricks to help enhance student learning in the classroom.  Especially handy if you use a lot of google tools in the classroom, as our presenter show numerous items or apps that can be put to good use in class.

He also gave several other sites as well!

newspapermap.com

http://www.newseum.org/

http://www.netvibes.com/ 
Can add tabs for various classes -- such as newspapers, media links, and various news sites can be added to help keep students up to date with current events and more.  Free!  extra credit -- tell me about one of the articles you read in the discussion form and add to it!!
Students can set up their own account.

Reading Terminal Market!

Very packed today for lunch, but well worth fighting the crowds, as I don't believe there is one bad place to eat.  We ate at the Grill @ Smuckers!  Had the Italian sausage sandwich with chips and Eric had the breakfast wrap with sausage and egg.  Both were wonderful, reasonably priced and it was great to experience something in the market that is a rich part of Philadelphia's history. 

Waiting for sessions

Here's Brent waiting for the keynote on Sunday afternoon.  The keynote on Sunday was Dr. John Medina, who is a molecular biologist.  Now, you may be wondering what a molecular biologist is doing at an educational technology conference.  Dr. Medina spoke about what scientists know abou the brain and how it learns.  His presentation was fast-paced, funny, and very interesting.  He talked about how the brain is 'wired' to make sure that we survive and that we learn what we need to know to survive.  Excellent job, Dr. Medina!  I think I might just have to buy his book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving & Thriving at Work, Home, & School, which was a New York Times bestseller.  You can find it at Amazon.com

ISTE 2011

Well we have gotten down to the Philadelphia convention center and we have both officially checked in for the conference!

A lot of people present for this year's conference and looking through the sessions over the next three days, there will be plenty to see and learn!  Can't wait to pick up new ideas, tools, tips, and items to use for the classroom and enhance student learning.

National Constitution Center

Today we began by going down to Independence Hall & visited the visitor's center-very well done.  Unfortunately Independence hall is being renovated so there is a bit of scaffolding on the exterior as the pic shows:

We plan on going to the hall later this week.  Instead, we purchased our tickets for the National Constitution Center, walked down to City Tavern to have lunch only to find out it didn't open until noon.  So we went and grabbed a philly cheesesteak, threw a penny on Benjamin Franklin's grave and walked to the Constitution Center.  The beginning presentation is good and the exhibits were really interesting.  We also purchased tickets for the special Spies, Traitors, Saboteurs exhibition.  It looked at the history of spying & espionage, terrorism (foreign & domestic) & other topics that focuses on restrictions of personal liberties.  

Finally, I had to get my picture taken with some of the founding fathers while Brent signs his name to the Constitution:

Our arrival!!

Day 1

We are on the ground in Philly!! Woohoo!!!!

After checking in to our hotel in Center City Philly, we ventured out and about around Center City and the area.  We stopped for supper at Nodding Head Brewery!!  a++++ Very good food!  We took a little walking tour around Philly to make ourselves a little more familiar with the wonderful city of brotherly love!  Tomorrow, we will venture down to the Constitution Center and also check in at the convention hall for ISTE!

Here we come!!

On our way to Philadelphia for the 2011 ISTE convention and historic Philly!  Can't wait as we are half way through our journey, we have now landed in Milwaukee with a 1 hour layover before boarder the little plane for Philly!

Don't worry, pictures to come!!

Philadelphia 2011

Welcome to the Philly 2011 trip!

We will be going to Philly on the 25th to attend ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) where we will have the great opportunity to gather information to bring back to our students in the classroom.

While in Philly, we are also going to take the opportunity to spend five days exploring the numerous historic sites in and around Philly.

Stay tuned for more information and photos!!