I blogged about an assignment we had in teacher certification classes over here today, if anyone is interested in joining the convo or passing on the link to teachers you may know. Have to go get the rest of my classwork done, but before I do, want to send a shout out to some former Citizen colleagues who are doing a soft-launch of the TucsonSentinel, a “news, info and commentary” site of the non-profit, new media model.

They are hoping for some major donors and until they get that they won’t be able to bust out like investigative reporting award-winning voiceofsandiego, but with funding – and thus the ability to pay some young {e.g. willing to work for less than $25,000}, hungry, kick-butt journalists – they very well could be. They’ve already been smarter than many of these online news launchups by partnering with GlobalPost, ProPublica and Cronkite News Service out of ASU. (You GO, boys!)

The site is nicely designed, easy to navigate and last night, after less than a week in operation, it held a live chat of the State of the Union address that worked better than any live chat I participated in held by the AZ Star or the Citizen when it was operating as a print paper. Of course, few people know about the Sentinel yet, so perhaps their server just wasn’t overloaded with a million comments, but still, it was impressive. So…. if you care about the future of news in Tucson, check ‘em out. Here’s their “Hello World” post.

Pope Benedict XVI

On Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI offered a new command to the world’s priests: Thou Shalt Blog. It was in the Pope’s message for the 44th World Communications Day that priests and others read B16′s take on preaching the gospel in the digital age:

Responding adequately to this challenge amid today’s cultural shifts, to which young people are especially sensitive, necessarily involves using new communications technologies. The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul’s exclamation: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16)

Keep in mind that the almost 83-year-old pontiff is the man of Pope2you and his own YouTube channel. As Mashable mused a few days ago, the pope “gets it” more than many of his younger clergy when it comes to reaching Catholic youth. It isn’t enough to have a parish web site; the pastor should be blogging, and tweeting and preaching the Good News out there on the Internet to combat the less positive messages infecting cyberspace. But, as Faith and Reason pointed out, they need to remember it isn’t their tech prowess they are showing off but rather, faith in JC.

The two priests at my parish are both on Facebook, although each uses it differently. One tends to write brief movie reviews and the other promotes events such as the Walk for Life. But both have a presence. One tried blogging last summer, but his posts were very long, something that most bloggers will tell you is a cardinal sin. Neither of them use Twitter, but that’s OK because so far, neither does the Pope.

There are a number of priests and nuns out in the blogosphere, including him, him and her, as well as plenty of non-ordained Christians, Jews and Muslims sharing faith, inspiration, commentary and all manner of takes on the world. As someone once said, “Here comes everybody.” I love it.

Courtesy of the wonderful Linda Perlstein over at The Educated Reporter comes a little post about an anonymous teacher (Mrs. Q) who is eating her school’s lunch every day and blogging about it. Linda references a USA Today story that says fast-food standards for meat are higher than that at most school cafeterias. If so, we have to worry about the teacher eating that food and, obviously, a millions of school kids on the free-and-reduced lunch program who have no option but to eat what is served. Today, Mrs. Q. ate a bagel dog, six tater tots, mixed fruit cup and chocolate chip cookie. She declined the offer of milk.

I made my kids’ lunches and when they were old enough to handle knife and peanut butter, they started making their own. Once a week they got to buy lunch – more often if they had a job and their own money. They ate crap those days, and I knew it would be thus, but I figured because they ate healthy home-cooked (and often home-grown) food the rest of the time and snacks like this ….and this never darkened the door of our home, they’d survive. When they went to college they binged on all sorts of junk for a few months then returned to the “I need some veggies” mantra of home.

But the problem is, some kids – most notably the poorest among us – don’t have those options. For some of them, school lunch is all there is for that day. Shouldn’t we, as a nation then, be more concerned about what we offer in school cafeterias?