Alice for Fun Learning!Teaching Students to Program With StoriesAlice is a 3D virtual worlds programming environment that makes it easy to create animations for either story telling or interactive games. Students can learn the intricacies of programming through enjoyable activities.Available for free download on the internet (provided by Carnegie Mellon), Alice has been used with 4th-6th grade youngsters on up to high school students. Teachers can use Alice to integrate computer science with any other discipline. Alice can be used in two ways:At the lower level students can learn enough Alice to build interactive worlds to integrate it into course modulesAt a higher level, Alice is a complete course on learning programming. In any current module in which a student creates a poster or presentation, the student now can build an interactive story or game as the presentation.The wonderful thing about Alice is that students, yes, even middle school girls, can learn computer programming through storytelling.What a breakthrough! Inspired Teaching Made Into FunMYST is another technologically-advanced program for involving and engrossing students to achieve peak levels of performance.These videos are about an award-winning teacher in the U.K. and the techniques he uses to motivate and inspire his students. As Clive McGonigal (the friend who told me about Tim Ryland) mentioned in his email to me. . .“How many classes of kids do you know that moan when the lesson’s over?”Enjoy the videos and take a look at the website. See what can be accomplished when teachers are allowed to use their creativity. What a fellow teacher says about the effectiveness of this technique.For years, Don Kingsland, author of “Set Our Teachers FREE! A Plan to Save Public Education” and “The Kingsland Plan” utilized creative techniques to help his students far surpass expectations. The newest generation of creative teachers is exemplified by Tim Ryans. Our students are brig...

Maura Marx has founded the Digital Library Program at the Boston Public Library and has been instrumental in securing the Library's support of Open Content principles. Maura is also the Executive Director of the Open Knowledge Commons, who last week introduced the OKC. What is the OKC? It's a new organization born out of the Open Content Alliance and dedicated to advocacy for and development of an open digital library of human knowledge. The following is an excerpt of the announcement first appeared in Open Access News: "...In funding start-up operations for the Knowledge Commons the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recognized the need to broaden the community's effectiveness beyond the research and development phase of mass digitization and to create a sustainable open digital library for scholarly and public use. This will be a very interactive session; comments and feedback on the OKC agenda will be encouraged and welcomed. Maura...began her career in Europe doing development work in cultural heritage institutions and later worked in the U.S. technology sector before coming to libraries and the open content movement. She holds a B.A. in German from the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. in Italian from Middlebury College and an M.S.L.I.S. from Simmons College." This is particularly important for teachers, since understanding participation in online communities is one of the important areas that will help educators and others who are interested in developing and maintaining effective learning communities. Findings in Leadership at a distance: Research in technologically-supported work's book provide more clues about creating effective online participation, but we still have way much to learn. It is particularly important for us as Education professionals, to understand more about the relationship between online relationships and online community building. OKC is just a good example and a great project we expect have 100% positive results, as all Berkman Center for Internet & Scoiety Projects. ...