Silvia Tolisano is one of my favorite bloggers. She has branded herself as Langwitches all over the Internet. Her avatar is a witch. She is at least tri-lingual, with an international flair, teaching in the United States with both European and South American roots. Her site is Langwitches.org.
Her latest effort effort of self publication at lulu.com is Digital Storytelling Tools For Educators.
It is a compendium of the online tools that she uses to tell stories digitally. Included among the tools are Audacity, Google Maps, Mixbook, VoiceThread, Windows Movie Maker, Wordle, and various other resources. She explains the use of the tool with well-annotated screen grabs and her well-turned prose.
Not only can download a free .pdf from Lulu, but the she has licensed her work under Creative Commons according to the cover of her book, available for $8.50. She does not explain on the book cover or on the Lulu what the terms are, however.
Doug Lemov came to instant notoriety in the lead story in New York Times Sunday Magazine on 3/7/2010, entitled Building A Better Teacher. It sent shockwaves through the edu-blogging communities, and educator-readers of The Times. The crux of his proposal is that”The smarter path to boosting student performance, Lemov maintains, is to improve the quality of the teachers who are already teaching.”
He proposes to do this by teaching teachers 49 specific techniques that he says will help any student to be 
college bound. His DVD-supported book is called Teach Like A Champion published this year by Jossey Bass Teacher.
To say the least, almost anyone would find it controversial, sort of Skinnerian to those truly hostile. There are two teacher in the school where I teach who want to make this one of our two faculty Summer reading selections. They are sold on the strength of the just the Times article.
Find Silvia’s book on Lulu, and read the newspaper article about Doug and see what you think.
