Here’s a couple of quick ideas I came up with during the MACUL conference today. I attended the following presentations as well as the keynote: “Tell the World Who You Are!” By Peter Reynolds, “From Information Literacy to Information Leadership” and “A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything” by Will Richardson.

- In Peter’s presentation he makes the point that blank books are his favorite books and that this gives the student a great opportunity. With today’s web tools, an enterprising teacher could have his students create with Blank books and then upload the results to one of the small book publishing companies online. This would allow the students to not only get the benefit of producing a real book but also the opportunity to reach a wider audience.

- An addition Peter’s story of his seventh grade teacher noticing him and how that changed his life ties in rather nicely with the story of the Dancer from Sir Ken Robinson’s Talk at the TED Conference. In each case an interested adult or teacher noticed something in a child and this attention made all the difference in that child’s life.

- This idea has been floating around in my head for awhile. Use the Google personalized home page as a classroom portal. A teacher could use some of the tools (Word of the Day, Wikipedia, This Day in History…) as daily content for classroom discussions. During Will Richardson’s presentation I thought a teacher could also use the RSS feed from Google News search engine to bring in content related to topics studied in class. This would provide a way of modeling Web 2.0 skills for the whole class. For example if a class was studying Endangered Species the RSS feed would bring in articles having to do with Endangered Species from around the world.

What do you think? Brainstorms or just drizzle…