It has been a while....

but everything is going very well!

It has been a busy week with a trip to a beach, a day of Berlin Wall history, a visit to a castle in Potsdam and 3 days at the Baltic Sea.

The water was very "fresh" but most of the kids were swimming anyway.....

Fussball Fieber is in full swing as Germany advanced to the semi-final with a 4-2 drubbing of Greece.  Most of the kids watched the game together in a big hall at the youth hostel.

We are off to Munich tomorrow and will be visiting another castle and Olympic Park after arriving.

I will try and be more frrequent with the updates.... here are some photos.

Here they are posing under Gorbachov at the East Side Gallery in Berlin.

 http://www.eastsidegallery-berlin.de/

We took a bike tour.... we rode in the rain on the way there and under sunny skies on the way home.... with a boat tour in between.  We had 3 flat tires total - David changed Sam's tire under a bit of tree cover and was actually quicker at it than the bike shop we were at in the afternoon.

A view of the chalk cliffs on the island of Ruegen.  The weather turned just in time for our tour.

The waves were crazy when we arrived on Thursday.  The water was so cold! 

The boys being boys....

Maddie, Mallory and Katie hanging out on the beach.

A picture of the beach outside of our hostel in Prora on Ruegen.

21st Century Skills

Creativity and Innovation
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Communication and Collaboration

I think these are skills that have always been valuable - not just in the 21st Century.


Information Literacy
Media Literacy
ICT Literacy

These are the skills that today's students must master in order to be successful not only now, but in the future as well.
I think one of the larger tasks is teaching students the skills they need to determine whether the information they find is quality, factual information or whether it is someone's opinion. Many students automatically click on the first link found under their Google search and don't bother to look any further - often times that link leads them to Wikipedia...

I am a bit troubled that the site gives no mention to industrial tech in their discussion of core classes. Manufacturing, engineering and development will never leave our economy and I think they are doing many students a disservice by dismissing the value of these courses.

It has been fun copying students' pictures from Campus and using them in the stories we do in class in German 1. Instead of using some unknown person like "Sven", I can insert a picture of a student in that class. It really has made a difference in the level of engagement in class.

I can manipulate them and superimpose them into pictures of famous German places, etc.

It has also been nice to create sentences by placing each word in a separate text box and then mix them up and have the kids unscramble them.

Now I need to find more time to be able to implement all of the great things a Smart Board can do....