RJ Stangherlin

Keystone Technology Integrator and STAR Discovery Educator

This site is for Mrs. Stangherlin's classes at Salisbury High School.

NAIMUN: Changing the World, One Issue at a Time

Why, you might wonder, would 28 Salisbury High School student delegates join 2850 students from 128 schools from around the world (mostly private/prep with unlimited funding and Model UN embedded into curricula) for 4 days of rigorous schedules and long sessions during Presidents’ Weekend.  Because they meet people from different backgrounds and cultures they would otherwise not meet, enjoy the spontaneous conversation, and collaborate on real-world issues that inspire them to try to change the world, one issue at a time.  Welcome to Georgetown University’s North American Invitational Model United Nations at the Hilton Washington in D.C. 

Our students participated on 10 of the 38 committees that examined the importance, idiosyncrasies, causes and effects of global issues like AIDS, the Kyoto Protocol, racism in FIFA, or any international situation.  Most of the major committees have two issues presented in the background guides.  Students write position papers responding to those two issues from their assigned country’s perspective.  Using parliamentary procedure, each committee decides which issue to bring to the floor.  Through the process of communicating with other countries, student delegates begin to gather allies with whom they can write and sponsor working papers that become resolutions with the goal of passing the resolutions.  Delegates gather allies by listening to people who speak on the floor or by writing notes to one another.  Once a resolution reaches the floor, the debate ensues, and delegates speak for or against the resolution until a vote is called for and passes or is killed in committee. 

The math on this project is staggering.

2 issues per committee + @6 resolutions per issue = 12 resolutions x 38 committees = 456 +/- resolutions = 4 days at NAIMUN. 

So is the mentoring.  An offshoot of Student Government, Model UN is one of the many activities that Miss Brinson sponsors through this organization. 

So is the real-world connection beyond the classroom, substantive conversation, extended writing, and construction of knowledge, the four standards for authentic social studies education.  If you are looking for exemplars of 21st century learning, you would be hard pressed to find a better model of student-centered, inquiry-based, collaborative learning. 

Secrets from the State Department

During Presidents’ Weekend, 28 students traveled with Miss Brinson and me to Washington, D.C. for NAIMUN, North American Invitational Model United Nations, hosted by Georgetown University.  NAIMUN began of Thursday, February 13, with a Keynote Address that promised to deliver STATE SECRETS.  A conference room housing over 2850 student delegates and their moderators suddenly hushed.

Mr. Fort, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, manages the production and dissemination of all-source intelligence analysis to the Secretary of State, other senior policymakers, and heads the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community.  Assistant Secretary of State Randall M. Fort gave the Keynote Address for the opening of the 45th North American Invitational Model United Nations Conference on November 14, 2008. 

Thirty-two years ago, Mr. Fort was a participant at a Model UN and he remembered being bored by the Keynote, so he wanted to do something different.  He offered his audience of 3000 spectators “secrets from the State Department.” At that moment, his audience quieted.

The secrets were a formula for success: 4 secrets containing 3 words each—words to live by.

1. DO GOOD WORK.  Come to someone’s attention that you are better than the mediocrities because you will enable opportunities for yourself.

2. DEVELOP AN EXPERTISE.  Find something you love and become an expert, a skills set that will serve you forever.

3. BUILD YOUR ROLEDEX.  Know people who can contribute to your career.

4. MAINTAIN YOUR INTEGRITY.  Don’t compromise your ethics.  Mr. Fort said this secret was the most important component to success.

After a short but motivating keynote, Mr. Fort devoted the rest of his presentation to fielding a Q and A session.

Meet Mr. McMahon

Young, energetic, global traveler, human rights activist--he’s Mr. McMahon, a senior English and Education major from DeSales University, where his sister, a freshman, also attends.  He graduated from Notre Dame High School in Lawrenceville, NJ (between Trenton and Princeton) His interests are highly diversified, as his students are discovering.  He draws and paints, preferring acrylics.  He also knows how to read drawings to “scale,” so guess who’s reading the IP stage set designs.  Mr. McMahon is also an accomplished photographer.  Throughout high school, he acted in the plays, and his favorite role was Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace. He loves to read, with Whitman, Dostoevsky, Vonnegut, and Albee ranking among his favorites.  A music lover, “almost to the point of obsession,” his current preferences: Brit Rock: Arctic Monkeys, The Fratellis, The Kooks, and Jamie T.  From this point onward, I’d like him to speak for himself.

“My passions in life, besides books, are traveling and human rights (the best is when I can combine the two).  I have traveled all over America and to 18 countries, including: England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Mexico, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, India, Egypt, Turkey, Croatia, Spain, and Peru.  Thirteen of those countries I visited when I spent a semester abroad with the program Semester at Sea.  In the realm of Human Rights, I feel compelled both to spread the word on world-wide injustice and go and personally contribute to ending injustice.  This year I helped co-found a new club on my campus called Advocated 4 Awareness.  Each month we select a specific injustice and sponsor events on campus that let people know that these things are happening and what we can do to stop them.  As president, I plan the events as well as take charge of the funding.  I am also very active on campus in other ways.  I am president of the senior class and secretary for the Student Activities Club.  In the summer I am a counselor for our overnight camp for underprivileged Hispanic middle and high school students.”

Mr. McMahon is one of those rare finds who actually walks his talk.  His next stop after graduation: summer in Africa working with AIDS / HIV victims.  Will he enter the teaching profession--I certainly hope so. 

Dembo Delivers the Goods

Cross-posted on STSD Curriculum & Technology, DEN PA, and ChangingConnections.

If you missed Steve Dembo‘s (aka Teach 42) Discovery Education webinar, Something for Nothing: The Best of Web 2.0, then you might not know you no longer need to use your telephone to connect to a DiscoveryWebEx presentation. Nothing beats hearing Dembo direct, but if you missed the streaming--or you want to revisit a packed hour of great new tools--you can check out the Discovery Webinar Archives.  If you are new to the Discovery Educator Network, you really want to explore the wealth of resources available to you when become a STAR Discovery Educator, because the DEN takes social networking to the next level. Now would be the perfect time to pitch a plug for tomorrow’s history-in-the-making Virtual Conference National Event, ground-breaking with local break out sessions at 30 different sites. It’s not too late to register.  Thank you, Tracy Standhart, for a great blog. (I borrowed your image.)

Steve’s list of cool tools began with 6 photo-related sites. Want to capture your stories and save them permanently? Then you want OurStoryWidget, created by Word Press, the weblog platform Discovery uses. OurStory lets you save stories, photos, and videos on a collaborative timeline. And that notion--collaboration--was a theme running throughout most of what Steve shared, an indicator of how embedded social networking has become in our lives.

When Steve mentioned the K12 Online Conference, I connected, because I used a segment on social networking by Jeff Utecht in my Digital English class. K12 Online made a big splash when it premiered, but has since lost some of its buzz. You really might want to revisit this site, because it hold a wealth of 21st century learning we can all use in our classrooms.

Kerpoff is a great early childhood tool that takes digital storytelling into a different kind of venue. But don’t let the elementary school look-and-feel fool you; it’s just a great tool with lots of built-in elasticity for mindful yet playful super-doodling, helping kids to connect online and create together. For the children in your lives, or the child in you, this easy web 2.0 site will engage and delight!

We all know Flickr and most of us probably use it for photo sharing, but according to Steve, there are 3 new tools that will make Flickr your first choice for managing your photo world, if it isn’t already. Uploading and organizing was always easy because you could +Add Notes, but now you can edit your photos as well.  Flickr’s edit defaults to Picnik, one of Steve’s earlier blog best-of-the-week sites. What’s great about Picnik: edit in a click, no registration, education friendly (not blocked in most schools), adjusts red eye and colors. Got to love Picnik, which you can, of course, use independently of Flickr.

If Steve loves FlauntR, that’s good enough for me.  When he says, “incredibly robust,” he wasn’t kidding.  How about it integrates with facebook, Picasa, flickr, myspace, orkut, hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Word Press, Live Journal, Blogger, and iGoogle. Not enough reasons to love FlauntR yet? It can make images for mobile devices. Or your best ever Valentine’s Day card. This one’s just got to be my new favorite tool.

By invitation only (email Steve, but after tomorrow), you can browse collaboratively with others inside your own Photophlow room.  Interesting way to browse photos, however, because if you are online within your room (account), you see everyone else’s photo uploads. Despite a short browse through this site, it is definitely the most interesting social browsing I’ve seen yet. Definitely a network, because acceptance to the site, for now, is a very private by invitation only. Can you imagine the possibilities for collaborative learning with the CFF Mac laptops. We just had our one day Apple Out-of-the-Box training, and I can’t remember which application had the option to share with your wireless network your photos, but Photophlow and Mac should be a great combination.

The next 2 websites are not Web 2.0 tools, but neat.  The World Clock has an almost unlimited number of uses in any discipline. You have to check out the website, and if you are a math teacher who said you could not integrate technology into your classroom, here’s the easiest and best place to start, and the tool is user-friendly. You’ll want to bookmark the website, because googling world clock will likely not get you to this one easily.

Steve’s taught us to teach our students about their new permanent record.  We get to see the updated version at PETE&C, where Steve is Tuesday’s Keynote Speaker. So I think about my digital footprint, but now we can think about our eco footprint at the same time using Blackle, which is Google gone black. Same search engine, just black. Why? Because it’s environmentally friendly. Google is a white screen, and white uses the most wattage; black uses the least. If your eyes can tolerate the black screen and you life Firefox, there’s a Brackle plug-in waiting for you to install.  At the moment that I accessed Blackle, 438,890.943 Watt hours had been saved.

Back to Web 2.0.  Poll Everywhere.  Just like it sounds.  Free for 100 votes; after that, it’s a purchase, but the site is considering offering educators a package deal, making it your new best poll tool, and economically friendly as well. What makes this poll fun and different: online polling, text messaging polling, embedded into a website, PowerPoint; download results as a spreadsheet or RSS feed. I wish I knew about Poll Everywhere two weeks ago when I made my mid-term for my digital English class.  Yet another bona fide educational opportunity to legitimize cell phones in the classroom. And a better polling tool, by far.

‘Tis the conference season, so a timely reminder from Steve about David Warlick‘s hitchhikr, the virtual way to hitchhike onto a conference and blogs connected to it.  Hitchhikr for PETE&C: right here.  Back to Steve’s kindergarten teacher roots for his next pick: Kindersay. Is there a better way to learn to read? You see the word (or letter), image, and you hear a person say it. There’s a word bank of 300-400 and growing, but this site is hard to beat for first-level language as students learn to read and write, collaboratively.

Not just another social network chat, Twitter is a solid educational tool, or can be.  Steve’s Twitter group is a collection of educators almost without exception. Or they are technology integrators, or both. The learning that happens inside this group is off the charts. Steve said that he sent a twitter feed yesterday, asking his group if they could list their favorite Web 2.0 tools. That’s how he found World Clock and now we all have it. The value of this kind of collaborative learning: priceless.

Zamzar is one of my favorites. I use it so frequently that I cannot imagine life without it. A great converter, it is fast, free, educationally friendly. It converts almost anything to anything else you want it to be. The list is endless, so for one stop conversions, this is my pick as well. The last item, like Zamzar, is a converter. ConvertTube will allow you to convert online video like YouTube to more popular formats like wmv, mov, mp4,mp3, 3gp. If you haven’t joined us for a Discovery webinar, you really should. Discovery Education always brings you cutting edge technology, before the edge is cut.

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