I am a newly liscensed teacher, currently substituing as I work towards finding a full time teaching job. I constantly see teachers going to various professioal development/training workshops. I have looked into attending such workshops, however, they are extremely expensive for a lone individual without a teaching contract. Does anybody have any insight on ways liscensed teachers (no longer students) without a contract can attend these educational workshops for little or no cost? I love to learn, and would love to add some training to my repitroire, please help!

Teacher Forums – Teacher Chat

Once upon a time, before we had children, we celebrated Valentine’s Day like many other couples. We went out for a romantic dinner. Not necessarily over-the-top or fancy but definitely a night off from cooking, dirty dishes and cleaning. Even after baby MacGyver hit the scene, we managed to get a babysitter for the first couple of years. It was still a night out alone for Mommy and Daddy.

When MacGyver was about three-years-old, I decided we would surprise Daddy with a little at home Valentine’s Day celebration. MacGyver made Daddy a card and we decorated the table “fancy” with candles. A new family tradition was born. Every Valentine’s Day the kiddos and I “surprise” Daddy with a little celebration.

My motto is keep it simple and low-maintenance! I don’t buy special decorations at the store and we don’t go all hysterical making crafty-crap. We put a red table cloth on our dinning-room table. (The same table cloth that doubles as a Christmas Tree skirt during Christmas.) Then we grab stuff from around the house like candles and simple little tea lights and I turn the kiddos loose making decorations. MacGyver made this Valentine Heart garland when he was five. I left it up for almost a year! It was so cute I couldn’t bare to take it down!

Valentine’s Day is about friendship and love. These days we celebrate Valentine’s Day by celebrating our love for our little family.

Following are some of the Valentine ideas I’ve been collecting at Pinterest. We will not do all of these! But we’ll pick a few for our at family Valentine’s Day Party . . .

From Pebbles In My Pocket Blog: We created our version of this tag today. I taught the kiddos how to hand-stitch the heart. I’ll put the lesson together for you and share soon. The kids loved it!

From Urban Comfort Blog: We also adapted this cupcake liner card idea today. We incorporated it into the above lesson on stitching. Cute! I’ll put this together for you also.

From Little Wonders’ Days Blog: The kiddos will totally eat this up. I love that it is a healthy Valentine treat.

From tablespoon: Going to try a healthier version of these little pops. More fruit, less sugar.

Homemade Valentine Cards: Each year the kiddos make homemade cards for family and friends. And we always remember Grandma! These cards include an art lesson on shapes.

Easy Hot Cocoa Mix: We also like to make special treats to share with friends and family. This mix is also great as teacher gifts.

From Sun Hats & Wellie Boots Blog: This “Heart – Outdoor Nature Sculpture” definitely looks like something my children would create while playing outside. This sculpture might just greet Daddy outside.

You can find many more ideas on my Pinterest board . . .

And of course we’ll read some great friendship books . . .

This week we’re giving away TWO sweet, sweet friendship books! Come win!

Life with Jeannine

waddlee-ah-chaa

Check out this talk by Clay Shirky, who speaks to the American situation and why these efforts to criminalize citizens of the digital world will continue across borders and time.

http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Rethinking Social Studies Education

Book of the Week GIVEAWAY: Gossie & Gertie and Gossie by Oliver Dunrea

Why we love these books:

We have an ongoing love affair with best friends Gossie and Gertie. Their friendship is so simple and yet so enduring. Through Gossie and Gertie’s sweet friendship, young children learn important lessons about sharing and the give-and-take of friendship. Friendship is not about always getting what you want, but rather about flexibility and generosity. Share a little Gossie & Gertie with your children during this season of friendship and love.

Here’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth . . . We two sister at waddlee-ah-chaa are physically and emotionally exhausted. Stay tuned for more on this . . . In the mean time, we’ve put together some links to Gossie & Gertie, friendship and Valentine ideas, including a popular FREE printable book we posted last February. We’ll add more Valentine links throughout the week.

Gossie & Gertie and a Little Math Fun

FREE printable book and lesson: It looked like a Heart

Toot & Puddles book about Friendship and lessons: Homemade Valentines

Step by step directions for making heart book marks from Holiday Crafts and Creations.

Step by step directions for making Valentine Crayon Hearts from Martha Stewart.

• I loved doing this when I was a kid. Here are the directions from Martha!

We’re GIVING AWAY Gossie & Gertie and Gossie by Olivier Dunrea.

To enter this contest, just answer the following question in the comments section of this post.

What is your favorite friendship book or movie?  (Or just say “Hey.” We’re flexible around here.)

The Rules:

One entry per person, please.

No entries after 8:00 pm Central Time, Thursday, February 2, 2012

The winner must be a resident of The United States.

The winner will be selected at random and announced Friday, February 3, 2012. Check back to claim your prize. It might be you!

Sharing this week at:

Hip Homeschool Moms

waddlee-ah-chaa

[Ed. note: Tune in to the livestream Monday at 9:30 a.m. ET]

Can the inventors of Watson help save sick children in the developing world? A “cloud-based” pediatric learning module, conceived by Children’s Hospital Boston and built by IBM Interactive, is being beta-tested this year in 20 countries. Provisionally called Pediatrics without Walls, it will give 1,000 doctors and nurses on five continents the next best thing to hands-on training. (Above is just a preview).

This simulation module teaches remote doctors how to intubate a critically ill infant — and connects to a curated social network where they can interact with colleagues around the world.

Web-based medical training is sorely needed. Trained pediatric personnel, especially those skilled in specialties like respiratory and cardiac care, are in short supply in resource-poor countries. Just 2 percent of worldwide medical expenditures are for education, with striking inequities between countries: according to a 2010 report, 36 countries don’t have a single medical school. Medical training missions can enhance local skill sets, but can’t address learning needs that crop up in between.

Consequently, Jeff Burns, director of the Medical/Surgical Intensive Care Unit at Children’s, gets called on for advice from all over the world. After a harrowing experience talking physicians in Guatemala through procedures for a little girl with sepsis, aided only by a crude videoconference link, Burns wondered: “How many other kids are we not doing this for?”

Burns will be at IBM’s Lotusphere conference on Monday, 9:30 a.m. ET, to present his vision: A web-based application that uses advanced social networking, analytics, video and simulation technologies to teach providers about medical advances, customizable to an individual’s learning style. It’s already been tested with physicians in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Lebanon, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen.

Interactive online ventilator training allows physicians to sharpen their reflexes and develop "muscle memory."

A doctor in the Middle East needing to understand how to correctly use a ventilator, for example, could view a video demonstration, read about ventilator best practices and train with a web-based ventilator simulator to increase his reflex speed and build muscle memory. He can hook up to a curated social network, enabling him to incorporate new information, exchange ideas on best practices and to discuss questions with his peers. “Nothing breaks down walls and brings people together like caring for a critically ill child,” says Burns.

The cloud serves everyone. For sick children and parents — including those in rural parts of the U.S. — quality care doesn’t have to be dictated by geography. For more, tune in to Monday’s livestream (9:30 a.m. ET) — or read Jeff Burns’s three-part series posted to Vector last year.

Vector

There are no best practices for turning patient’s genome sequence into information that a doctor can easily understand…and act on. Children’s Hospital Boston’s CLARITY Challenge calls on the genomics community to come up with those practices, and possibly help three families in the process. (michab37/Flickr)

Personalized medicine, harnessing genomics to improve patient care, is a great idea on paper. But investigators have long struggled to find a smooth route from the bench – where patients’ DNA samples are sequenced – to the bedside, where a doctor can use a genomics report to diagnose illness, prescribe treatments and offer means of prevention.

Looking for innovations, Children’s Hospital Boston decided to use the incentive of competition, launching a contest called the CLARITY Challenge. The winner will be the company or group that can best translate the science of genomics into tools and methods that integrate into and inform everyday care.

Here’s how it will work. The Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research at Children’s will provide raw DNA sequence data – generated by contest sponsors Life Technologies Corporation and Complete Genomics – and clinical summaries from three children and their families. Each child has a disease with an as-yet unknown genetic basis. Teams of contestants must figure out how to get from DNA sequence to root cause and, finally, to a report that a physician can easily use to guide recommendations about care.

In this contest, we all win

Using a contest to drive innovation isn’t new. The poster child is the Ansari X PRIZE, a competition that spurred the development of commercial space flight. Within genomics, there’s the Archon Genomics X prize, a million award for the first team to successfully sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. There are also the Ion Torrent prizes, million apiece, for any research team that boosts the speed, quantity and accuracy of Ion Torrent’s Personal Genome Machine.

But CLARITY (which stands for Children’s Leadership Award for the Reliable Interpretation and appropriate Transmission of Your genomic information) is different. It does not focus on laboratory elegance or speed of sequencing. Neither does it reward gene sleuthing for the mutations underlying a patient’s or family’s disease, as is now in vogue, according to the journal Nature.

Instead, CLARITY reaches for…well…clarity: Can genomic information be conveyed in a report that a doctor can read and interpret in a way that tangibly helps the patient?

Other genomics efforts, some very well bankrolled, have tried and failed to do this. And so the question arises as to why Children’s researchers, offering a modest reward of ,000, would have the audacity to think they could do better.

The answer is prestige. Prizes draw attention to a cause someone considers worthy of discovery. Contests create a community, which anyone who is anyone wants to join. And scientific competitions can draw out innovation from the most unexpected places.

“If researchers are out in Bulgaria or Kansas, they might not be able to compete with the big boys,” says Children’s bioinformatics guru Isaac Kohane, who is leading the Challenge with partners David Margulies, director of The Gene Partnership (a Children’s initiative that will eventually deploy the innovations that come out of the contest locally at the hospital and, in time, on a global scale); and Alan Beggs, director of the Manton Center. “Here we are giving everyone a level playing field, saying ‘go for it, innovate, compete.’ ”

Calling all genomicists

Creating the prize was a community effort. Kohane approached Margulies and colleagues and hosted a conference in 2010 aimed at addressing the challenges of providing consistent and clinically useful information to physicians and their patients based on large-scale genome sequencing. The Clinical Bioinformatics Summit at Harvard Medical School was covered in Bio IT World and attended by 110 handpicked stakeholders (from basic researchers to biotech executives to clinical laboratory directors). Among the conference’s outcomes was recognition of the need for clear standards of clinical utility and open comparisons of evolving techniques, methods, findings, and interpretations for a particular specimen – the seeds of the CLARITY Challenge.

Will you take the Challenge?

Registration opens today at http://www.childrenshospital.org/CLARITY and closes on March 1. Twenty teams will be selected to participate; those teams will be announced and the sequences released to them in April. A panel of judges will evaluate the contestants’ entries on their technical approach, the accuracy of the findings and the readability of the report.

The winner will be announced in October.

“We have catalyzed the more advanced thinking about what it would really take to get this genomic medicine to become real,” Kohane says. “I expect that we will be surprised and gratified by how well teams will do.”

Vector

(Karl-Ludwig Poggemann/Wikimedia Commons)

Recently, in the hospital cafeteria, I overheard a group of researchers discussing the upcoming availability of whole-genome sequencing to physicians. “We should devise a way to study how physicians will use this,” said one of them—underscoring the disruptive nature of the transformation that is currently happening in medicine.

The ability to immediately obtain whole-genome sequences from patients holds enormous potential for understanding and treating human disease. The list of studies reporting successful diagnosis of otherwise elusive orphan conditions is already too long to recount—more than 600 articles in PubMed as of the date of this posting—including poignant examples of advancing clinical care. Some are transformative achievements, such as a recently published study that identified mutations causing a complex childhood movement disorder. Whole-genome sequencing not only yielded a fundamentally novel biologic discovery, but also led to an effective therapy, resulting in clinical improvements in both patients in the study.

However, widespread use of whole-genome sequencing comes with novel responsibilities. It can yield unexpected results, which will need to be communicated to patients responsibly. The CLARITY contest, announced by Children’s yesterday, is an excellent start: Companies will compete to interpret DNA sequence information from three patients and report it in a form that a physician can easily use to guide patient counseling and care.

By virtue of producing an individual’s unique DNA sequence, clinical use of whole-genome sequencing will create other challenges: how to maintain individual privacy and confidentiality.

The recent decision by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to impose mandatory screening of athletes for sickle cell trait is just one example of how knowledge of the genetic basis of disease may be used outside of medicine. Similar information can be used by health insurance companies to decide insurance eligibility and prices, by employers to guide hiring practices (no matter how illegal), and by individuals to select mates or decide the fate of a pregnancy. Because whole-genome sequences correspond uniquely to each individual, the distribution of whole genome sequencing data for research purposes is tightly regulated, requiring users to be authorized by the National Institutes of Health and to abide by a strict Code of Conduct.

However frightening privacy abuses may be, the more daunting challenge is to integrate the sequencing results of many individuals. This integration is essential since only 1 percent of the 3 billion nucleotides of the human genome contain genes, and only a fraction of these have known functions in human physiology. A full understanding of their function and contribution to disease requires integrating genomic data across currently distinct medical specialties. An oncologist seeking to understand the genetic predisposition for the development of a particular tumor needs access to test results from other individuals with that tumor, but understanding what the sequence variants mean for other diseases requires access to still more individuals and their clinical records.

Add to that the fact that analysis of the whole-genome sequencing data is never completely finished, as illustrated by the recent example of a patient with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The original analysis, reported in 2008, found 10 genes with mutations. A subsequent analysis reported in 2010, using improved methods, identified additional mutations, including one in a fundamental gene found not just in the original patient but in more than 20 percent of adult patients with AML. This discovery opened important areas of clinical and basic research, and potentially new therapeutic approaches.

Overzealous controls on the use of whole-genome sequencing have the potential to curtail such advances. Data integration and future testing require explicit consent from patients, often years and even decades before the questions and tools for performing such analyses are developed. Current practices by the Institutional Review Boards that regulate biomedical research limit investigators’ ability to contact study participants to discuss test results and solicit further information. Yet, this communication is crucial to avoid unapproved use of genetic samples, as emphasized by the recent legal settlement involving the Havasupai Indian tribe, and to return potentially useful knowledge to patients.

Currently, health providers from all fields of medicine, like my cafeteria neighbors, are asking the same question: How will we use whole-genome sequencing in our practice? Hospitals, physicians and scientists will need to educate themselves and their patients about the potential benefits and risks of this emerging technology.

Alex Kentsis, MD, PhD, is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at the Dana-Farber/Children’s Hospital Cancer Center who is applying translational genomic and proteomic technologies to advance the treatment of children with tumors and inflammatory diseases.

Vector

Brian Rosman holds up a tablet app he and a team of Children's and MIT Media Lab staff developed over the past two weeks during the Health and Wellness Hackathon

At 10 a.m. he’s directing two actors on set, at 10:34 a.m. he’s filling up a catheter and at 11:01 a.m. he’s gushing about the importance of pediatric avatars. Brian Rosman, a Robotic Surgery Research Fellow in the Department of  Urology at Children’s Hospital Boston, has been working non-stop at the MIT Media Lab’s Health & Wellness hackathon to create a new app for post-operative care. His duties have included directing a video about the app, rounding up realistic props and explaining how the program works to judges and hackathon attendees.

Rosman and his team of coders, clinicians and industry professionals are competing against five other teams for a ,000 prize awarded to the best open source healthcare application.

Patients create their own avatar in RALPH and receive a check mark next to completed tasks with the aim of collecting points for each activity

The app was inspired by urologist Hiep Nguyen‘s work in robotic surgery to help kids after lengthy medical procedures. Rosman and his team believe RALPH (the Recovery Application for the Home) will empower patients to monitor their health after surgery.

“This helps patients become involved in their own care and recovery,” said Rosman. “Normally families will see the end result of a surgery but aren’t fully involved in helping their child get there–this changes that.”

The application features an avatar that the patient creates pre-surgery and then can see after they return home. When the patient checks off medical tasks like taking a medication or monitoring their fluid intake they get points. With enough points they can “buy” accessories for their avatar which creates an incentive for kids to follow up on the doctor’s orders. Rosman’s team includes David Furnivall, Paul Franzosa, Uri Feldman and, from the Innovation Acceleration Program’s FIT Team at Children’s,  Melinda Tang, Gajen Sunthara and Elizabeth Phillips.

The winner of the competition will be announced at 4p.m. today and the 2nd and 3rd place winners will receive ,000 and ,000 each. Stay tuned, we’ll announce an update within the next hour!

[UPDATE 4:50pm]: The winner is the asthma management team, and Children’s Hospital Boston won third place!

Vector

Rethinking Social Studies Education

(Lars Plougmann/Flickr)

Your child has been in the hospital and it’s discharge day. It’s a chaotic scene: You’re trying to take care of him and maybe his little sister who keeps running down the hall, while completing hospital paperwork and packing your bags.

You’re finally out the door, in your car, kids strapped in and … what?  You’ve just lost contact with the medical professionals who took care of your son. What was it they said to do at home again?

Perhaps you try phoning but can’t get through to your doctor. Or you try to email through the hospital’s secure system, but can’t put your hands on the password. The doctors hope you remember to pick up your son’s meds.

Vinny Chiang, a physician at Children’s Hospital Boston, came up with a simple idea. Could day-after communication with patients be “pushed” — proactive and automated? Could it be texted?

Supported by a grant from the Innovation Acceleration Program at Children’s, Chiang has a prototype that he’s getting ready to test in one of the hospital’s inpatient units. In addition to the usual discharge procedure and instructions, patients and/or parents would be texted three yes/no questions the next day. The exchange might look something like this:

If parents (as hoped) text back “yes,” “yes” and “no” in that order, they’d receive an automatic “thank you” response as above. Any other response would alert a nurse or hospitalist physician to call the family.

“When we would call patients after discharge, a lot of the information we collected was in paper notes, and it just kind of sat,” Chiang told a recent Innovators Forum at the hospital. Texted replies, on the other hand, are trackable could provide valuable information about possible gaps in the discharge process, and maybe help streamline it.

Vinny Chiang

Ultimately, though, the project’s goal is to reduce “unplanned” medical visits attributable to poor follow-up care. Chiang and his team — hospitalist physician (and Vector blogger) Fabienne Bourgeois; Jayne Rogers, Nursing Director of Inpatient Medicine; and Kelly Dunn, Inpatient Medicine Discharge Nurse Practitioner — will monitor the number of subsequent urgent care visits, emergency department visits and readmissions, as well as patient satisfaction and the practical feasibility of text-based communications.

Simple as this may sound, forum attendees, representing all walks of life at the hospital, had plenty of questions. How would the text messages be tracked and logged? How would they integrate with the patient’s medical record? Could patients’ texted replies automatically be forwarded to their primary care provider? Could responses to question #1 link to actual pharmacy data?

In the case of a teen, would texts go to both patient and parent? Could texting go even further, and be used for patient education? Would providers be able to tell if patients were using that feature?

One audience member suggested Outpatient Surgery as a good place for a pilot – the incentive would be great, since surgeons cannot collect their fees if the patient is readmitted within 30 days. But another colleague was concerned about “phishing” – criminals posing as coming from the hospital, and seeking personal information. And also, what if patients don’t answer the hospital’s texts?

“There are still a number of issues that need to be worked out,” Chiang acknowledges.

But he’s confident that the final product will bridge what he calls the most important distance in medicine: the three feet between the clinician and the patient.

“I believe at Children’s we do a truly great job when the patient is right in front of us, but this becomes much harder when the family heads home,” Chiang says. “Hopefully, this tool will enhance communication and allow us to provide a feeling of intimate care even when the patient is home.”

Vector