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Dear Lauren: The homework which underwrites and guarantees successful integration of Microworlds into a school system is, in the initial phases, much more about conjuring attitude than superimposing strategy. Many teachers regard any new analytically-challenging, concentration-intensive programs requiring long-range commitments in an unfamiliar experiential theater as ranking up there almost as high on the top 40 desirability list as say, a firing squad, unpaid leave a midnight visit from the KKK, an Afghanistan Honeymoon, a swig of Socrates-quality hemlock. So the lion's share of your efforts to engage prople will be campaigns of enchantment rather than arsenals of strategy. One needs to find ways to camouflage the labors with charm. Define concrete, creatively visualizable activities and their fruits, the deliverables, and make them teacher-friendly, turbo-charged with inspiration, and the rest is footnotes. No clipboards, no 'death by details', no talk of 'one size fits all'. Create an alternative to sterility, people will begin 'jumping ship' in growing numbers. The innovation diffusion mode. And it is the children who will do your charming, and let their laughter voice the intrinsic merit of creativity as higher a motive than the acquisition of skills and knowledge. More about how to involve the kids later in tomorrow's post.......... From the PR point of view, I have found in 9 years of managing elementary school computer labs using Microworlds , that individual and collaborative authoring both in creative writing and in social studies, makes the most graceful justification-exempt way to bridge from a concentration-camp gradebook food-chain mentality to authoring, i.e., to working out of imagination. So what's to publish? Recipe books (a digital camera, capturing kids with waffle batter up to their third knuckle) Stationery, customized, at Parent Meetings, available to peruse at the online web site. Downloaded and/or postmarked stamp collections, turned into turtle shapes, used in a template of a postcard or an envelope. The advanced kids get to scanning, sizing, and launder the postmarks, and put their own names on stamps. Maps of villages, cities, states, countries. A map of Europe or the US can feature Flags, downloaded, and edited into shapes. Make different sized diamonds to reflect city population size. Icons to show various economic enterprise, (factories, mining, agriculture) Topographic Keys (mountain, forest, desert, swampland, plain, tundra) Civilization Map Keys (National Parks, Camping facilities) By 6th grade, kids can reuse other's works or their own last years works (plan on longevity, on building a permanent, inter-school sharable library, internet accessible), Map skills prepare the way for integration of a math component, of estimation, and simulating travel agencies to various places can fill a month or three. Collaborative groups plan itineraries, use a variety of vehicles on routes (on foot, horseback, llama, camel, bikes, rental cars and jeeps jeeps, chartered helicopters, planes, boats) (if you're NASA, you create vacations on different planets). (If you're Tolkien or George Lucas, you have to know what kind of vehicles to use) Itineraries can also include ships exploring the New World, Marco Polo's voyages, the settlement of the US. Lots of inert 8 and a half by eleven to be set in multimedia motion. Kids have to plot distance and aim, switching shapes, from horse to bike, ship, jeep. railroad, when necessary. The Math-Expert member(s) of the team, use glide, and set up a movement that reflects accurate comparative speed of vehicles. Say, for example One minute = one hour's travel, as coordinated with the map scale. Several itineraries on the same map. Not just to execute. Team members make their projects for others, who have to use stop watches to figure out mileages, given observation of times as the independent variable. Add to this The Money-man. (Ken Lay not available) Rents the vehicles on an hourly or daily basis. Hotel, motel, hostel, campground, food fees have to be figured out. Kids might have to get brochures, and search the internet to acquire real rates. They create tabs, and create receipts. Online cash register programs. Use Turtle shapes worth a thousand words, calculate change. There's your gifted program. For your offroad kids, create Original lands and maps of unknown places, and vehicles, science-fiction inspired. Create stories, and at each place you click on a map, a text or movie comes up dynamic dioramas. An ambitious third grade class sized their faces, pasted them on scanned dinosaurs, and taught the dinosaurs now to speak by clicking on the face. Juraissic Interviews 101. Then merged the pages into a book. When you become daring, you can create "roadmaker guns". You set a slider to a road type, 1-dotted line path,2- double dotted line donkey trail 3-graded,........n=Interstate n+1=airplane route. Each a unique symbol. Then aim, and "Spray out a road" in segments. You have to inlay the coordinates of the segments into a list, and learn item. Then kids make "Living worksheets" to stump their friends. You build a library. Next year a teacher who needs to see the Battle of Saratoga choreographed by infantry icons, militia, artillary, cavalry, borrows the projects of kids. The death of textbooks. Geometric modelling, making castles from arc, polygon and box-builders. Learning how to create turtle-dots, miniature turtles which can be sprayed out, creating axes of symmetry which can be "erased via ht". It's 1:49 AM in TUCSON, 50% chance of drenching the desert tomorrow. Drown in Dreams, and say goodbye, Earlyfire. Tomorrow, how to get the kids to do all the teaching, how to make pictorial gradebooks, set up merit badges, grant college degrees. and a discussion of what can be taught simultaneously, learned in teams, and what needs to be learned sequentially. Then on to developing infrastructures, peer tutors, community parent/child nights, using digital cameras to print out counterfeit money, and selling it for use in your multimedia fairs. And to ask the forum what kinds of programs they would like to see the University for Imagination create to enable printing out Origami, Paper Airplane and three-dimensional architectural foldables, obelisk popcorn containers. You must buy a proxima projector to shout Microworlds from the Rooftops. We have dead to wake. From all of us ABC reporter elves here at the North Pole, op [Good Night] warm regards, Harvey ========= "Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but mankind cannot comprehend."I am new to MW and am looking for some basic starter project suggestions for grades 4-6. Something that will light the imaginative fires of the students as well as their teachers. Ludwig van Beethoven Dear Lauren: The homework which underwrites and guarantees successful integration of Microworlds into a school system is, in the initial phases, much more about conjuring attitude than superimposing strategy. Many teachers regard any new analytically-challenging, concentration-intensive programs requiring long-range commitments in an unfamiliar experiential theater as ranking up there almost as high on the top 40 desirability list as say, a firing squad, unpaid leave a midnight visit from the KKK, an Afghanistan Honeymoon, a swig of Socrates-quality hemlock. So the lion's share of your efforts to engage prople will be campaigns of enchantment rather than arsenals of strategy. One needs to find ways to camouflage the labors with charm. Define concrete, creatively visualizable activities and their fruits, the deliverables, and make them teacher-friendly, turbo-charged with inspiration, and the rest is footnotes. No clipboards, no 'death by details', no talk of 'one size fits all'. Create an alternative to sterility, people will begin 'jumping ship' in growing numbers. The innovation diffusion mode. And it is the children who will do your charming, and let their laughter voice the intrinsic merit of creativity as higher a motive than the acquisition of skills and knowledge. More about how to involve the kids later in tomorrow's post.......... >From the PR point of view, I have found in 9 years of managing elementary school computer labs using Microworlds , that individual and collaborative authoring both in creative writing and in social studies, makes the most graceful justification-exempt way to bridge from a concentration-camp gradebook food-chain mentality to authoring, i.e., to working out of imagination. So what's to publish? Recipe books (a digital camera, capturing kids with waffle batter up to their third knuckle) Stationery, customized, at Parent Meetings, available to peruse at the online web site. Downloaded and/or postmarked stamp collections, turned into turtle shapes, used in a template of a postcard or an envelope. The advanced kids get to scanning, sizing, and launder the postmarks, and put their own names on stamps. Maps of villages, cities, states, countries. A map of Europe or the US can feature Flags, downloaded, and edited into shapes. Make different sized diamonds to reflect city population size. Icons to show various economic enterprise, (factories, mining, agriculture) Topographic Keys (mountain, forest, desert, swampland, plain, tundra) Civilization Map Keys (National Parks, Camping facilities) By 6th grade, kids can reuse other's works or their own last years works (plan on longevity, on building a permanent, inter-school sharable library, internet accessible), Map skills prepare the way for integration of a math component, of estimation, and simulating travel agencies to various places can fill a month or three. Collaborative groups plan itineraries, use a variety of vehicles on routes (on foot, horseback, llama, camel, bikes, rental cars and jeeps jeeps, chartered helicopters, planes, boats) (if you're NASA, you create vacations on different planets). (If you're Tolkien or George Lucas, you have to know what kind of vehicles to use) Itineraries can also include ships exploring the New World, Marco Polo's voyages, the settlement of the US. Lots of inert 8 and a half by eleven to be set in multimedia motion. Kids have to plot distance and aim, switching shapes, from horse to bike, ship, jeep. railroad, when necessary. The Math-Expert member(s) of the team, use glide, and set up a movement that reflects accurate comparative speed of vehicles. Say, for example One minute = one hour's travel, as coordinated with the map scale. Several itineraries on the same map. Not just to execute. Team members make their projects for others, who have to use stop watches to figure out mileages, given observation of times as the independent variable. Add to this The Money-man. (Ken Lay not available) Rents the vehicles on an hourly or daily basis. Hotel, motel, hostel, campground, food fees have to be figured out. Kids might have to get brochures, and search the internet to acquire real rates. They create tabs, and create receipts. Online cash register programs. Use Turtle shapes worth a thousand words, calculate change. There's your gifted program. For your offroad kids, create Original lands and maps of unknown places, and vehicles, science-fiction inspired. Create stories, and at each place you click on a map, a text or movie comes up dynamic dioramas. An ambitious third grade class sized their faces, pasted them on scanned dinosaurs, and taught the dinosaurs now to speak by clicking on the face. Juraissic Interviews 101. Then merged the pages into a book. When you become daring, you can create "roadmaker guns". You set a slider to a road type, 1-dotted line path,2- double dotted line donkey trail 3-graded,........n=Interstate n+1=airplane route. Each a unique symbol. Then aim, and "Spray out a road" in segments. You have to inlay the coordinates of the segments into a list, and learn item. Then kids make "Living worksheets" to stump their friends. You build a library. Next year a teacher who needs to see the Battle of Saratoga choreographed by infantry icons, militia, artillary, cavalry, borrows the projects of kids. The death of textbooks. Geometric modelling, making castles from arc, polygon and box-builders. Learning how to create turtle-dots, miniature turtles which can be sprayed out, creating axes of symmetry which can be "erased via ht". It's 1:49 AM in TUCSON, 50% chance of drenching the desert tomorrow. Drown in Dreams, and say goodbye, Earlyfire. Tomorrow, how to get the kids to do all the teaching, how to make pictorial gradebooks, set up merit badges, grant college degrees. and a discussion of what can be taught simultaneously, learned in teams, and what needs to be learned sequentially. Then on to developing infrastructures, peer tutors, community parent/child nights, using digital cameras to print out counterfeit money, and selling it for use in your multimedia fairs. And to ask the forum what kinds of programs they would like to see the University for Imagination create to enable printing out Origami, Paper Airplane and three-dimensional architectural foldables, obelisk popcorn containers. You must buy a proxima projector to shout Microworlds from the Rooftops. We have dead to wake. >From all of us ABC reporter elves here at the North Pole, op [Good Night] warm regards, Harvey ========= I am new to MW and am looking for some basic starter"Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but mankind cannot comprehend." Ludwig van Beethoven To save an attachment to your computer, PC users should right-click (Mac users, click and hold the mouse button) on the link and then choose 'save target as' from the pop-up menu. A window will then pop up in which you can choose a location for the file. | |||||||