Whoa, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. It’s been hard to come up with stuff that both my year one and two folks can use. Luckily, history was made this week with the election of our first African-American president, Barack Hussein Obama. I have a few resources you all should check out.

NPR has a report titled “How to Teach this Election” that should be available later today. Personally, I subscribe to the NPR stories regarding education to my Google Reader. Year two people should remember our discussion concerning RSS and readers. If any year one folks are interested, I can help you set something up.

Want to see the front pages of newspapers from all around the world? The Newseum is a journalism museum that features the front pages of many newspapers form around the globe. They have a page specifically for this past Wednesday reporting Obama’s win.

For those of you who study political cartoons, cartoonist Daryl Cagle posts his cartoons daily. There are several interesting ones posted after the election. I think the one featuring the Lincoln monument could be particularly interesting to address in class.

Illustrator Patrick Moberg has created a rather poignant image of all the presidents (pictured above). Barack Obama’s image is a striking contrast to those who preceded him. This would be another great discussion starter.

The Big Picture provides larger-than-life images that capture the essence of important news stories. The election is no different. The photos of Mr. Obama are remarkable and fully illustrate the enormity of his victory.

There are even a few great resources for the numerically-inclined educators. For an interactive map of all the national election results, check out the New York Times map.The map makes it possible to see voting results from the national level down to individual counties.

If it’s polls you’re into, the folks at FiveThirtyeight.com explain how the probability fits with determining the election winner. A word of warning regarding FiveThirtyEight: They are rather biased toward Obama, but in the election aftermath, this might not be as big of a deal. You could also ask your students to search out the site’s bias.

Are there any other resources out there that you have used to teach the election?

Monday:

We have our all-day website work…er…day…all…um…day long. (Sorry for the redundancy.) The goal is to have every-one’s website ready to post with all the pages and links set up. There is no set agenda except to work on our sites. This has me so excited that I’ve finally updated my site. I also plan on figuring out drop down menus for the few people who have inquired about them. If you have any other skills or features you’d like covered, post it on the comments of this blog or ask me during the session. Angie, the woman from the module cover, will be there through the morning to assist. Ruth may stop in as well.

Tuesday-Wednesday:

I will not be out to your schools since I have a conference presentation on which to work (more on that later) and to visit two university classes in order to present on blogging. One class is a Web 2.0 writing course taught by my wife’s colleague, Donna. The Wednesday class is actually at Ohio State-Marion. I’ll be talking to my friend Ben’s first-year writing class via iChat on the same topic. My mentioning this is to demonstrate the direction writing at the college level is heading. Your work with eMINTS in using technology in your classrooms will have effects on your students’ future academic endeavors!

Thursday-Friday:

The eMINTS Winter Conference takes place over two days. This is a conference you all attend in your second year in eMINTS. Some of you may even be inclined to present…nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

I was volunteer…I mean, I offered up my services to present on classroom blogging. The hope is that the bandwidth at our conference’s hotel will hold up so that 44-46 people will be able to read and comment on a blog I’m setting up just for the conference. If all goes well, I will have to do very little talking, the participants will experience blogging, guide their own learning, and start their own blogs.

If you are interested in the blogging going on in my session, check here later in the week.

Besides updating my website, I have reorganized my del.icio.us account to include bundles of the tags. Bundles are one way to better organize your bookmarks. It’s sort of like grouping your bookmarks into multiple folders tagged with a theme and then grouping those folders again in multiple folders. It should make my del.icio.us account easier to navigate.

The week is going to end with a weekend long film festival here in Columbia. True/False features documentary films from all over the world that cover a wide range of topics from issues of globalization to teenage angst. My wife and I plan to attend 14 films! I should be ready to get back to the calm serenity of classroom visits and training sessions on March 4th.