Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

One of my favorite edubloggers (who resides in a folder for Experts in my reader) has set up a new location for his blog. That’s right friends, David Jakes, expert at Digital Storytelling Guru (just to name a few of his many educational tech skills/expertise) has created a new web presence and moved his blog [...]

Since I’m considering a location change, I’m dabbling with the thought of changing the name of my blog too. I Googled TechnoTuesday, and found a rather comical but raunchy site (which i won’t link to here). My blog was born October 1, 2006 on Blogger[correction-July 2006], but I moved it to Edublogs October 31, 2006, [...]

As I see others reflecting on the year 2007 as it draws to a close, I must as well. There have been several changes for me including a new job, a new living arrangement for my family, and new opportunities that are as a direct result of joining the blogosphere and interacting with a network [...]

Ive been tagged by Diane–thanks. I am to list seven unknown facts about me. I am the fifth child of seven. Here we are together this past July–first time we had all been together in about five years. I was the first National Board Certified Librarian in my district. Every year my family waits until [...]

As I prepare for my Christmas break, I am surprised at the number of teachers who drop by to ask my opinion about purchasing cameras for Christmas. So I have responded with the following information. Of course I am by no means an expert, so if you have knowledge above and beyond what I have [...]

What a difference a week makes! Saturday the Edublogger awards were announced, and I was so sure I did not win, I did not even go into Second Life to hear who did, nor did I tap into the many portals made available live (like Edtech Talk, Skype, and others…) You see, as I told [...]

Recently I traveled my 170 mile trip home (I work in a different town from my family, and only visit home on the weekends) and arrived only to be totally disgusted that I did not pack any jeans. Worse, not a single pair of pants! Now before I draw a pity party, let me say [...]

Last night I conducted my parent workshop on Teen Social Networking sites (like MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, and more.) The plan was to have a general PTO meeting for the first fifteen minutes, followed by twenty minute sessions on an assortment of topics including: Social Networking & Teens (Mine) Lexiles How are We Doing? An informal [...]

What do the pictures on this post tell us about these students’ engagement? Can you tell who is “into” the lesson, and who is not? Sometimes engagement is painfully obvious, and other times it isn’t. Can anyone tell I had a LOT of staff development in recent years on this?? As a staff we were [...]

“The business of schools is to design, create, and invent high-quality, intellectually demanding schoolwork that students find engaging.” – Phillip C. Schlechty The key to school success is to be found in identifying or creating engaging schoolwork for students. – Phillip C. Schlechty The Working on the Work (WOW) framework is an outline for improving [...]