September 2010 links

It might be a better thing if I make my posting goal once a month. That way if I have more to say it will be a bonus. School has consumed my time. I suppose this is good since they do pay me for that. But I have felt guilty not spending time making any posts. I have had some good links come by my computer screen lately but have not had the opportunity to share. Hopefully anyone who sees my posts also reads many other blogs.

Here is a very cool one for today to start us off. Coming from BBC is Dimensions. The quick description from their site says "Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are." Simply put, that sums it up.

To use this in the classroom: It would give students a grasp on the relationship of events to their own place in the world. They(we) often cannot imagine the enormity of something that doesn't happen in our neighborhood. This brings it all home.

Looking back at the First Week of School and 2 great links

We have finished our first week of school and I was exhausted by the end of Friday. I was lucky though to end the day with a very pleasant group of 4th graders. A nice way to go into the weekend. I would have to say the first week went rather well. My kindergarten class this week was a nice surprise also. In fact, I recorded them singing a song and place a clip on my St E Music Wiki. Take a listen!I always enjoy seeing our students come in with their fresh out of the package uniforms. You could see that some shirts still bore the marks of manufactured pressing and folding and knew they opened the wrapping that morning. Their attitudes were as fresh as their new uniforms and we teachers greeted them with smiles and our own "fresh and rejuvinated" outlooks. It felt good and comforting. A good omen I think.

I don't think I shared this site yet, and cannot remember where I first saw it listed. I am sure on one of my favorite blogs so I appologize to the original poster. I am always on the lookout for free music or sound effects and this one is very cool. Free Nature Sounds lets you mix and create a variety of nature sounds that you can link to or export it as a wav file. Very nice.

And if you were not aware of Monkey Machine this is another online drum machine but great fun to use and create drum beats. I used Monkey Machine when my class of 6th grade girls created a math rap. Very easy to use with lots of options.



This week will be a full week. We will have our first student mass on Friday. Each week a different grade/homeroom prepares the mass. 8A will do this week so that means lots of singing for me. Time to talk about proper singing and posture, breathing and so on. I need to find or create a singing "checklist" for the SmartBoard. I'll have to do some research and see what I can find. More to come!

Inservice, Meetings and getting ready for the First Day!

This was our "official" week back to school. It was a week filled with meetings and pages of information. The best day of the week of course was Monday which was my day. By that I mean, it was my day to present technology to our staff. We had quite a bit to cover and I wanted to show them some cool tools also. We did a quick review of Discovery Education, Thinkfinity and the ever important presentation on Copyright in the Classroom. Besides all of that we were able to do a quick "look-see" at Edmodo, Google Timeline and Wonderwheel, Batchgeo and we ended with Voki, everyone's favorite. I was excited to see many of our teachers want to set up their own wiki space for their classrooms. They are also wanting to use as much technology as they can. Today one of our teachers was working on a bullitin board and created a word cloud. I love seeing their enthusiasm and willingness to learn.

Unfortunately the bulk of the rest of the week was devoted to meetings. Not that they were all that bad, it is just hard to focus when I am thinking of all the unfinished things I have to do before the first day with students. I understand that we must have these meetings prior to the start of school to prepare our teachers for any new requirements within their schools or districts. The problem I see is that teachers do not have enough time to prepare their classrooms (basically redecorating every year) and plan those new and exciting lessons for the first week of school. It seems they must do all of this on their own time. Coming to school a week ahead of the required start or staying long into the evening.

My intent is not to whine and complain. It is the nature of the beast. This is just my observation of many years of first days of school. I also offer no solution since there is not simple way to resolve this. I hope though that administrations recognize this devotion and remember when their staff might make requests.

End of Teacher Tech Camp

This has been a great week. Our teacher students this week were so awesome. They had wonderful ideas on how to use all the new technology tools we introduced them to. One of them, Brian, was immediately embedding widgets and such on his classroom website. It was great to see everyone so excited. Ideas were popping up everywhere!

One of the reasons this week went so well was that our students (the teachers) were all eager to learn. They were excited about something new. This is how we want all of our students to be. It doesn't matter if they are teachers coming to learn new computer skills or young students coming to learn new skills. The instructors were also excited to teach and I know that made the difference in how the week went. Is it that hard for us to bring that excitement into our own classrooms? Now that August is here and we are all heading back to our schools, we need to keep that energy going. You cannot start the year with a ho-hum attitude and expect your students to be happy and ready to learn. I love summer and could live in perpetual summer but I am ready to start the school year. My brain is churning with new ideas and I am looking forward to trying some new things with my classes.

So here are some goals for my year:
1- keep an updated wiki for all the things my students do during the year
2- kind of related to #1 since I will need to keep my students active to have something to put on the wiki!
3- all grades, not just 6-7-8 will do some sort of project with technology- not sure what, yet, but they will!

My favorite tools to use for this year will be VoiceThread, Voki, Wikispaces, Edmodo

Check this out from Larry Ferlazzo: (one of my favorite blogs! This man is awesome!)
“Only Connect” Is A Great Game For The Classroom
Only Connect is a BBC game show that also has an online site.
There are sixteen squares with words on each one. The player needs to use the words to create four categories of four words each. It’s a great game that helps develop the higher-order thinking skill of categorization.
The online game is too difficult for all but advanced English Language Learners, plus you only get three minutes to complete it.
However, the idea is a wonderful one for the English Language Learner classroom (and even mainstream ones, too). Students can create their own, and then can exchange their creations with a classmate, who in turn can try to solve them. All students need is to make sixteen boxes on their paper.