Cartoon of the Week --

Cartoon by Tom Gauld, one of a series of awesome literary-inspired cartoons published weekly in The Guardian.

Let's Bring Fat Kid to Boise!

Ridiculously awesome punk-rock YA novel Fat Kid Rules the World is now a movie! It premiered at SXSW in Austin last month, and is being distributed through Tugg.

So how does Tugg work? Rather than the top-down organization of a studio release, individuals request events from the website and choose a venue, date and time. Tugg contracts with the venue--including locally-owned movie theaters--and sets a threshold for ticket sales. Marketing and promotion are up to the theater and to the group or individual who made the request, and if enough people by tickets via Tugg's website, the screening is on!

I love this model of consumers getting together to drive the market. I'm going to float this out to my librarians' book club next week and see if we can make a screening happen.

But even more than that, how could this model be used in schools to democratize activity offerings and increase student participation, particularly if promotion is student-driven? Lots of student suggestions for activities, classes or clubs, or even units of study could be planned from the bottom up by giving students the opportunity to present the idea, then promote and get a certain level of commitment to participate from other students. How powerful--and authentic--would it be to answer "Can we do ___?" with "Yes! How can you make it happen?"

Cartoon of the Week -- Cat and Girl

Existential angst from Cat and Girl.

Top Ten Tuesday -- Top Ten Pacific NW Vacation Spots I've Been Fantasizing About Since June

My summer vacation finally, FINALLY started this week after seven weeks of summer school and a week of AVID training in San Diego. That gives me a week to get the house and yard in shape after eight weeks of neglect and about ten days to get out of town until I have to be back at work. These are the places I've been dreaming of going.

I feel like the pictures are pretty self-explanatory.

1. Crater Lake National Park

2. Yellowstone National Park

3. Glacier National Park

4. The Oregon Coast

5. The Sierra Nevada

6. Coeur d'Alane

7. The California Redwoods

8. Multnomah Falls and the Columbia River Gorge

9. Vancouver Island

10. Washington's Olympic Peninsula

Readers, where have you been itching to go this summer?

Cartoon of the Week -- Tech Support

From XKCD.

Food for Thought

I think I want to let this percolate for a little while:

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham claims there’s no data to support the fact that kids all learn in fundamentally different ways. This is not to say that all children should be taught in the same way, but that the source of different learning styles has more to do with talents and interests than the development of certain parts of the brain.

Evidence actually supports information to the contrary, which states that students learn best from lessons that employ all verbal, visual, auditory and kinesthetic explanations of the material. In other words, it’s the layered experiences that really allow educational ideas to stick with students, rather than just a single method.

via Edudemic.