October 2010

I have not been very good at making posts recently. It seems once school starts my life spins on super fast speed. Christmas program is fast approaching, TMEA and TCEA are in February. Catholic Schools week before that and then it will be Young Authors Day, Art Fest and Graduation.

So here is my link for today- just saw this one and think it is valuable. This comes from one of my daily reads Free Technology for Teachers. If you don't already read this blog you definitely need to bookmark it. Richard Byrne offers more ideas and links than you can imagine. Wonderful, wonderful resource for teachers. In a recent post he shares the link to Open Educational Resources. It is "a place for educators to post lessons and lesson materials that others can use. There are thousands of lessons organized by content area and grade level. After you've made your initial selections of content area and grade level you can refine your search by lesson type, material, media format, and usage rights." (Byrne)

As a fine arts teacher, I naturally look at the lessons for that area. It is common for lesson plan sites to not have many fine arts lessons that I find workable. However, at OER I was able to find a number of lessons that really are nice. The ease of search makes OER a new favorite of mine. I highly recommend this site and thank Richard Byrne for sharing this link.

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.