I was entertained yesterday when reading the Library of Congress’ post “What did Lincoln Say about Extemporaneous Speaking.” The post had an interesting segment of a letter that Lincoln wrote to his wife Mary Todd, though it wasn’t the content of the letter that intrigued me, it was his salutation. He wrote “Dear Wife.” When sharing this with a colleague this morning, he said, “What if you had the students guess who wrote the letter or who it was to.” What a great idea! It could be a, “Who Wrote It” based on the date, salutation, and as much content as they see. Granted, providing a transcript might be needed, but it would be a fun way to have an authentic mystery to solve. Happy Friday!
about cases on the Supreme Court’s 2013-14 docket. Some of them typed their notes into a Google Doc, others used Pages and even one used paper (amazing, isn’t it?). Once we were finished, all of the research needed to be turned in and it was my goal to allow the students to see the work of the others so I created a Google doc that had a table in it and each student typed the name of their court case into the document. The students who created their notes in a Google doc clicked “Share” and set the privacy settings to “Public: Anyone With the Link Can View.” They then copied the URL, went to their case name in our shared document, highlighted it, clicked the link button, and added their URL so their case name became a hyperlink to their research. For those who created their notes in Pages, we uploaded the document to Google Drive, didn’t convert it, and then shared it with the same process. For the one who wrote out in pencil? We scanned the paper to pdf, uploaded it to Google drive and shared that too. It was great.
No Time to Sleep 