Today’s post is from Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and Editor-in-Chief of Citizendium:

I’m writing to ask you to help get a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video contest, WatchKnow, off the ground. …

Imagine tens of thousands of excellent short videos explaining nearly every topic taught in U.S. public schools. WatchKnow will be a free (open content), non-profit beta project, to launch probably this fall, to see whether we can create that. We will set the topics and invite teachers–and everyone–to submit videos. Videos will be rated, and, at a certain point, we’ll select a winner for each topic. We’ll give the winner(s) within each topic small prize(s), such as $75 and $25, but the amounts have not be decided firmly yet. We might award substantially more for certain topics. You could think of it as an American Idol for teachers, but we are not affiliated with American Idol.

The project is being carried out as a new program of the Citizendium Foundation, with funding from a retired Memphis millionaire who wishes to benefit American education. I’m the project’s Executive Director, and we’re now in the process of looking for and hiring a technical contractor who will actually build the system (see Craigslist).

Read more here
For future updates, please add yourself to the project announcement list, watchknow-l.

Because it’s non-profit and open content, we of course don’t expect to make money from this project; it’s charitable. Thankfully, our start-up capital is more than adequate for purposes of the beta-test project.

But we will need the help of volunteers to make this work. Educators, ed tech specialists–especially educators who make, use, review, and otherwise care about educational uses of online video–are needed to participate in a Video Review Panel, which will choose topics and rate videos. On the current plan, panel ratings will compose half of the score for any individual video. We could also use your endorsement and support for the idea! See: WatchKnow Participation.

If you’ve complained about the paucity of high-quality educational content online, here’s a chance to do something about it.

FILM (Finding Inspiration in Literature & Movies) is a movie curricula program for young people promoting literacy, activity-based learning and service.

The program was created in 2004 by Heartland Truly Moving Pictures and the National Collaboration for Youth . Its focus is the development and distribution of free curricula based on Truly Moving Picture award-winning films to channel positive messages and life-affirming themes into the minds and lives of youth.

The curricula are designed in conjunction with movie studios and youth educators to get youth reading and watching quality content, provoke thought and exploration of pertinent themes and issues, and inspire participation in theme-based activities and service projects.

Guides are currently available for 20 movies, including the following:

• Prince Caspian
• Because of Winn-Dixie
• Happy Feet
• Freedom Writers
• Ratatouille

The guides are rich with activities emphasizing literacy skills, character development, and community service/activity.

Special thanks to Terri at Learning is For Everyone!

I laugh — sometimes out loud — when I read Mark Twain. My students find him boring. I put together a WebQuest to help them appreciate different kinds of humor, and it was modestly successful. (They grudgingly acknowledged that he was SUPPOSED to be funny.)

I got to thinking, though, that it wouldn’t be that hard to expand it into a unit on American humor in general. We could start with Benjamin Franklin, who wrote some wonderfully satiric pieces. There would be a dead zone through much of the early 1800s, but once we hit Twain and O. Henry and move into the 20th century, we have Saroyan and The Human Comedy, teaching a new definition of the word comedy. We have Thurber. We have the Marx Brothers (Imagine watching Duck Soup as part of a lesson!). And we have Bob Hope, whose career spanned most of the 20th century.

Students can research Bob Hope’s career at the Library of Congress site, “Bob Hope and American Variety.” The exhibit includes biography, an overview of his career, and samples from his joke files.

By the time the unit gets into contemporary comedians, both copyright and inappropriate language makes things problematic. (Jeff Foxworthy is the only one I can think of whose humor could come into the classroom without very careful clip selection.)

Students could present an analysis of 3 humorists from 3 different decades and show how the changes in their work parallels changes in American society. This might lend itself well to a multi-genre presentation.

Now, I’ll need to come up with some guidelines and a rubric …

If you teach a unit on mythology — or even if you don’t — you have GOT to visit Zak Hamby’s Nixa Mythology site and click on Teacher Resources. This is a terrific example of what happens when you get out of the way and let a creative teacher explore the possibilities!

My personal favorite — based on sheer creativity — is the Trojan Find-it. Think “the Iliad meets Where’s Waldo?” Mythological Barbie is a very close second, though.

I suggested to Mr. Hamby that his obvious talent could earn him some extra gas money if he were to offer these resources at a reasonable price. He responded, “My intent is … to make those resources available for free. Since I worked so hard on them, I just want them to be used!”

Give the man his wish — visit the site, bookmark it, add it to your Del.icio.us collection, and spread the word. Summer school is coming for some of us, and August is just 9 weeks away for the rest of us.

The Library of Congress presents the Veterans History Project, a repository of personal narratives, correspondence, and other visual materials (photographs, drawings, scrapbooks).

On Memorial Day, as we honor the memory of those who gave their lives in the service of our country, this might be a good site to visit.

Next fall, when we are looking for a project that will engage students in research, interviewing, editing, and community service, we might want to visit again.

When a parent is deployed overseas, reading a bedtime story becomes problematic. Teachers have known for years that having parents read to their children goes as far as anything a teacher can do to support early literacy. And both parents and children cherish the time spent together with a good story. When duty calls now, technology can assist:

Even though service members at Camp Eggers, Afghanistan, are separated from their families by thousands of miles, they still can read to their kids.

Thanks to the efforts of one noncommissioned officer assigned to the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan, more than 200 parents deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom have done so over the past four months.

The “Read To Your Kids” program was established in late November by Army Reserve Master Sgt. D. Keith Johnson from the OMCA public affairs office as a way to bring deployed troops closer to their loved ones while they are away from home. On March 18, Johnson reached a new milestone as he completed his 200th taping.

Read the entire article.

This program is supported by Any Soldier and by United Through Reading.

Special thanks to Jamie Wheeler for the heads up on this one!

Recently this e-mail classic hit my inbox again:

Message from John Cleese - British comedian:

To the citizens of the United States of America:

In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy).

Your new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

1. You should look up “revocation” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

2. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

3. The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘colour’, ‘favour’ and ‘neighbour.’ Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ without skipping half the letters, and the suffix ‘-ize’ will be replaced by the suffix ‘-ise’. Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels (look up ‘vocabulary’).

4. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as “like” and “you know” is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be
adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter ‘u’ and the elimination of -ize.

5. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

The statement goes on, but you get the gist of it.

The text was too uneven to have been written by John Cleese, but parts of it were witty enough that I could hear his voice as I read it, especially the bit about Kansas. So I turned to one of my favorite resources in researching e-mail, Snopes.com.

Fortunately for me, a search using “John Cleese” came up with the right page as the first choice. What I found was great research on the origin and history of the piece:

It evidently originated on with one Alan Baxter of Rochester, U.K., who wrote and posted a much shorter, four-item version to an internal newsgroup hosted by his employer in November 2000, as a wry commentary on the recently concluded (but far from decided) U.S. presidential election:

London, 8th November 2000.
To the citizens of the United States of America,

Following your failure to elect either a half decent candidate or man-monkey as President of the USA to govern yourselves and, by extension, the free world, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume a monarch’s duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, please comply with1 the following acts:

1. Look up “revoke” in a dictionary
2. Learn at least the first 4 lines of “God save the Queen”
3. Start referring to “soccer” as football
4. Declare war on Quebec

Tax collectors from Her Majesty’s Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all revenues due (backdated to 1776).

Thank you for your cooperation and…have a nice day!

From this first post, the piece grew to include 10 items, then 13, then more.

This would explain the unevenness I sensed as I read the version in my inbox. But it also gave me an idea — wouldn’t our students enjoy researching the history of Urban Legends and legendary e-mails like this one? And wouldn’t that kind of research go a long way toward establishing the information literacy skills they need so that they stop believing everything they find published online?

I’m sure this kind of information doesn’t turn up in a simple Google search. I have written to the Snopes people to find out what tools they use in their research. When I hear from them, I’ll let you know.

Teacher Gail Desler and her students have produced A Time of Remembrance, an ongoing oral history of Japanese-Americans who endured the internment camps during World War II. Desler describes the project as recording the “living voices” of these people and views it as a legacy.

This is a good resource for anyone who is teaching Journey to Topaz, Farewell to Manzanar, oral history, or World War II. Desler adds, “All of those interviewed have given permission for teachers to incorporate the interview clips and photo images into lessons.”

I first became acquainted with the My Hero Project at NECC in San Diego in 2006. Kids research someone they respect and admire, write about him/her, and publish their work at this site. It was a wonderful program then, and it has grown to something even better now.

Let’s consider the literacy skills alone:

• reading for comprehension
• understanding cause and effect
• organizing and classifying information
• using tables of contents and indexes to locate information
• restate facts, summarize main ideas
• connect prior knowledge to new information in a text
• distinguish between fact and opinion in informational text
• prepare a document using technology
• gather evidence in support of a thesis
• use Standard Written English
• demonstrate understanding of correct spelling, punctuation, and other writing conventions
• apply appropriate manuscript conventions
• support assertions using examples, facts, and relevant details
• edit and proofread using an editing checklist
• integrate quotations into a text
• synthesize information from multiple sources

Let’s also consider what happens when students write about why they respect someone. From the youngest child to the most cynical adolescent, each writer chooses a vision of goodness that will stay with them. Not perfection, perhaps, but something to measure their own actions by, a means to develop character. In the long run this project make better choices in tough situations.

Browse the entries at the My Hero Project (www.myhero.com) and join them as they “celebrate the best of humanity.”

Educator Mary Tigner-Rasanen teaches at Studio Academy Arts High School, a public charter school in Rochester, Minnesota. The school works to integrate the arts into all areas of the curriculum.

As part of a presentation at a preschool inservice workshop, Mary gathered projects she and others had been using and produced this matrix of ideas. The list includes these:

• Create tattoos for characters in fiction, non-fiction, or history, and write an explanation of their significance.
• Create pop up books of stories, processes, or historical events.
• Create paper or fabric ‘tapestries’ for representing historical events.
• Create Kamishibai, illustrated storytelling cards from Japan
• Create a soundtrack
• Plan a meal based on an historical period, a story, or ingredients available in a particular natural environment.
• Write dialogue between historical figures, scientists, natural elements, etc. (Carla’s note: How about “The ugly divorce of Mr. and Mrs. Uranium-235″?)

Mary plans to add to it the chart as she hears of or thinks of other possibilities. She adds that she will use this Web page as much as anyone: “Sometimes in the crush of the year my creative juices dwindle. The chart will be there as a reminder to me.”

And to colleagues everywhere. Thanks, Mary!