Edina Digital Age Learning

My nominee for the 2008 Edublog Awards for Best Resource Sharing Blog goes to Jackie Roehl's Edina National Urban Alliance Program Blog . For those unfamiliar with the National Urban Alliance (NUA), they are an organization whose mission is: to substantiate in the public schools of urban America an irrefutable belief in the capacity of all children to reach the highest levels of learning & thinking demanded by our ever-changing global community. Through the use of Thinking Maps , teachers and students use specific strategies to give meaning to their learning. Developed by David Hyerle , Thinking Maps identify the 8 ways to visually represent information. Jackie has done an exceptional job on her blog offering resources and insights into incorporating NUA strategies into curriculum from a variety of disciplines. She is very deserving of this award!

From Jackie Roehl, Area Leader for Language Arts at Edina High School and author of a GREAT blog on National Urban Alliance Thinking Maps English 10 is continuing the practice of having each student create a blog. This year English 10 students will use their blogs to write about the various texts that they are reading for pleasure. The English 10 team has entered into a partnership with U of M Professors Richard Beach and Cynthia Lewis who will be assigning nearly 60 graduate students to read and comment on the Edina English 10 student blogs. The English 10 team is also submitting a research grant proposal to David Hyerle , the inventor of Thinking Maps , to analyze the student blog entries to study the impact of Thinking Maps on writing, reading, and relationships. If American Literature teachers want to have students establish a blog this year, students should still have last year’s English 10 blog online and could simply add entries to that blog. That continued blog could become...