Happy Thanksgiving...already??

Suffice it to say that my catch-phrase this year has been, "It's ___________ already?" I cannot believe how quickly time is flying by.

In the last week, we had:
Thursday the 11th day off for Veteran's Day
The following Friday at school with many kids missing.
Student-Led Conference on Thursday the 18 (no classes).
Many students missing the following Friday (again).

Next week, we have:
1 full day of school (Monday)
A half-day (no regular classes) on Tuesday

.........

SOOOOO....

This is not the prime-time to be starting something new, especially not a new writing assignment. The wiki has been quiet save a few unprovoked and unassigned posts by students at home.

Something that has gone extremely well in the last week is this cookbook that we've been creating. I had kids volunteer to be cookbook editors; I wasn't sure how many would volunteer or if I could count on them to see it through to the end (you know how middle schoolers are). In the end, it could not have worked out better. I had 7 editors, representing every group I have (8-1, 8-2, 8-3). One person from each group wanted to be a proof-reader, so students in the respective classes had to email that student by Friday, Nov 12 with their cookbook page completed and each editor had the weekend to edit, make changes, etc. They saved the pages into a folder which I collected on a flash drive on Monday morning. These 7 kids also stayed after school on Wednesday, Nov 17 to print off the pages, organize them into categories, make up a table of contents, make an index, and do other "little things" that would have taken me FOREVER to accomplish. I am so proud of these kids and am especially proud that I can put out a publication that is truly student-driven.

Digital Elements that we could not have done without in this project:
1. School email
2. Pages templates and our moodle site (from which kids downloaded the template to create consistency from page to page)
3. Tamsapedia (our wiki)- a few kids could not upload their page to an email attachment because it was too large. They instead went on tamsapedia, uploaded it there, and then sent their classroom editor an email with a link to where the editor could find their piece on their tamsapedia page