The End is Near

Well here we are in our last full week of school. It has flown by!!! Bonnie and I were able to serve about 140 students in the 7th grade with our grant devices. The students really enjoyed using Blogger, Glogster, and the flip videos. They enjoyed learning how to podcast, but it was very time consuming. This grant gave the students numerous opportunities to have technology on demand whenever they needed it. It also gave them options to present projects and use their creative skills.

I've had a lot of fun learning the technology. It's been a very long and trying road, but I think we did the best we could. It's definately been a great way to end my teaching career-well for a while. I'm sure Bonnie will have me on speed dial to help her with any technology issues she has & I'll be happy to help!

Glogster

It has been a while since we last posted. We have been so busy trying new things.

Below you will see some examples of the online posters that my students have created using Glogster. They created these posters within their book clubs & presented them to the class. Along with the poster, they turned in a group notebook that recorded their discussions, notes, plot diagram, character descriptions, etc. The kids really seemed to enjoy working in Glogster, and I have to say that I was very pleased with the outcome of the project.

My SBISD Accounts & Google Docs

We began working with our MySBISD accounts and Google Docs this week. The students love working in them. They are typing up their examples of strong leads & imagery. The students are also working on a research project with a partner. They are collaborating with one another on Google docs. They are so engaged. My most talkative group works so hard and they ALL stay on task. It would be so nice if every student had their own laptops to work on daily.

My first email to the students welcomed them to their new email accounts & then I asked each of them about one thing they would like to learn this year with the new technology. I had a wide variety of answers, but the most common was they want to learn to type faster. I think it would be great if we could get a typing class or program impletmented into the curriculum for them to work with.

Everything is working great as of now. Let's keep our fingers crossed that everything continues to go smoothly.

Netbooks & Brain Pop

Today in class the kids used their net books to watch two videos on Brain Pop about plagiarism and paraphrasing. The students will be writing a research paper over a Texas city and these videos will help them understand what to do & what not to do within their papers. After the students finished the videos they took the quiz and emailed their results to me. All of the students stayed on task and seemed to really enjoy watching the videos. I tried uploading my video of the students using the netbooks, but it won't upload.

Another Use For Emails....

I was grading the students this weekend and wanted to email some of them congratulatory notes on some good papers. I also had some that I wanted to give a “heads-up” they were slipping. Some had emails that they used when they signed on to my webpage but many did not. If we had this set up, it could be a wonderful communication device.

Unseen Issue

We were so excited after leaving our podcasting training last week about our technology. Bonnie & I both began working on our own podcast to show the students before we begin our next big project. Yesterday I tried logging in to the Mac Book that I had started my podcast on & I was unable to log in. After trying all different types of ways to get it to work I quit. I began working on another computer. I started working on a Keynote slide show for our Back to School Night. I finished it all up & was ready to set it up to my projector and...they don't connect. There is a special connector that we need, I'm sure from Apple, for our projectors. Now, the plans we had to show our students the podcast, that we so diligently worked on last week, have changed. This is very frustrating.

Also, another unseen issue is that none of the Mac Books have the network folders, i.e. Sweden, Alaska, Norway, on them. You have to put in a Geek ticket to have those loaded on the Macs. So now it's sit and wait until the tech guys can come out to do this. My kids are very eager to begin working on them, but saving their work is an issue.

September 14th; Students review work

As part of the learning process about book reviews and videotaping, I wanted the students to watch their own videos and then identify what they could improve on and what they did well. This would be the written component of their project. They were excited to see their videos because most just "shot" and turned in. After they ran to the computers and waited to log in and get connected, none of the students were able to watch their review...they all had the stutter problem with the video.