Linda's blog

I just tried a new slideshow tool that I really like–except–you have to send to you-tube before you can put the video on pageflake. Go to animoto.com to check it out.

I hope you will enjoy blogging. Just remember to set up a regular time to post, describe either a technology lesson you taught or a helpful website you visited, and reflect on how it worked and changes you would make.

What an exciting time of year for teachers and students alike! New challenges face us just as they have every year as we start another school year. Of course, having our schedule changed at the last minute just added to the number of challenges, but the truth is each year brings something unexpected. We just found the unexpected a little earlier than usual in 2009!

I hope all of you had a mixture of a productive time as well as a restful break over the summer and are ready to start anew. No matter how you feel about how the year is starting and your assignments for the year, you must remember that the children you teach had little to do with setting up the year. Your job is to help all of the students have the best, most productive year possible.

I have for a long time depended on a quote by Haim Ginott to revisit when I  get frustrated with challenging situations. That quote often helps me put my focus once again on what is truly important in the classroom. When I was in the classroom, I kept a copy of this in my desk drawer. (I would never have found it ON my desk.) I hope you will read it and think about what it says.

I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized

I’m looking forward to getting back to working with all of you. I will email you soon about coming to visit. I am purposely staying away during preplanning since your time is so short, but if you have questions before I get to you, please just email me.

Spring is such a beautiful time in North Georgia, but I can imagine that many of you do not have the arrival of spring on the top of your “to think about list.” I would bet that the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Test in a notch above the wonder of spring!

And that’s too bad, isn’t it? I’m reading an interesting book, “Readicide”, about how our high stakes testing is making our children good test takers, but not necessarily good students. I have to agree. But, I also have to agree that testing is a fact of life, like it or not, and we have to get our students as prepared as we possibly can.

Now is a good time to use the Web 2.0 tools that you have discovered to help your students get prepared. I am preparing a lesson on differentiation using the Internet, and found a tool that looks very promising. It looks like something that would not take too much preparation on your part, that students would enjoy, and could provide some change in routine while still allowing for review.

This website has quite a few already prepared set of flash cards, but you can also make your own. When you put in your own list, it makes flash cards for you, but also gives the student a dozen other ways to review material. I can see that this would be very good for math vocabulary such as names of types of two- and three-dimensional objects, language vocabulary–like parts of speech, kinds of literary devices, etc.,and for science or social studies vocabulary. If several teachers at one grade level work together, you could build a good review that students could use at home as well as at school. Your gamers will like the bug game, and those who enjoy hangman and word search will be happy also. No matter which way they decide to use the games, they will practice what you need for them to know by test time.

One other site I found that those of you who use your projectors and whiteboards will find interesting. It allows you to draw an approximate circle, then makes a perfect circle for you. For the mouse-challenged, it’s wonderful. Be sure to take the tour before you start playing with this one. When I first tried it, I was not impressed, but when I found all that it would do, I could certainly see it’s usefulness.

Let me know how you like these sites, and let all of us know how you are using technology to help prepare your students for THE TEST.

I found an interesting tool that I think elementary students would love to use.  I discovered it on a site that used it for students to describe themselves and their interests, but I think it would be fun for students to use it to make a summary of whatever they are studying by using key words to make the word art. The end products are called wordles. (www.wordle.net) I made one using fourth grade geometry terms, but you could use adjectives or other parts of speech, words that could be used instead of said in writing, Civil War generals or battlefields, types or components of soil, etc. Check it out!

I have learned so much about so many things in this online course; the first of which is I really need to work on time management and being able to focus on the task at hand! I found that once I got going, I did fine, but I was not very good at pacing myself, especially once we got into the holiday season with so many special activities. I’m glad the class didn’t start in November! One of our class members suggested that people sign up for the class in teams. I think that is a wonderful idea to help people keep a focus and share ideas with one another.

More than the time management and focus issues though, I have been introduced to so many valuable tools. I have started wikis for the elementary teachers to share books they have used in the Writers’ Workshop. I’ve encouraged our computer lab supervisors to work with the teachers to develop pageflakes to use on the lab computers. I have found subject-matter websites to suggest to teachers with those special interests. I’ve shared bits and pieces with teachers all along, but I just can’t wait to figure out how to get to the largest group of teachers to reach the largest number of students. I would love to have my own classroom again just to use all of these new ways of learning and sharing! I’m so lucky that my grandsons will be exposed to these tools to help them as they get further in school.

I’m sure this has been a real learning experience for us all. I always found that the more my students learned, the more I learned. So, Jerrie, you must have really learned a lot! I appreciate so much the patience and the knowledge that Jerrie had to use to make this such an enlightening experience for me!

I am not so sure that I am very comfortable with the use of social networking as a tool in my work. I don’t really know why; perhaps I have a need for control that I have not recognized before. It would have to be used with a group in which I had a lot of trust! The groups that I read often had very negative comments on them, and quite a few responses that seemed to go beyond being helpful and into the realm of hateful. Maybe I just picked the wrong groups to follow.

I can see the possibilities of using the networks for groups of teachers, such as second grade teachers, or media specialists, or teachers working with kids with ASD. Maybe if the group was limited in that way to begin with, I would feel more comfortable suggesting this way of communicating. I just have to remember that just because this kind of communication makes me uncomfortable doesn’t mean it can’t work with others with different needs. (How much all teachers need to realize that!)

I want to explore this topic more thoroughly, figure out what bothers me about it, and figure out a way to help others use it to their advantage.

It seems that every new thing we do I decide it is the one thing that will make the teachers’ job so much more efficient. Many of our teachers use the computer for little else than creating a newsletter, keeping grades and attendance, and using our Successmaker program. Google Docs, though, should change that! I can see so many possibilities with this tool. In October, we had a SACS visit and I worked with Susan Reeves in our county office to develop an introductory PowerPoint for our superintendent to use with the visiting team. Both Susan and I are part-time employees and getting us together in the same place at the same time was quite a chore. I ended up sending her updates while she was revising what I had just sent, etc. Having the presentation on google docs would have made that chore so much more efficient!

We have several grade level groups of teachers who write newsletters together. Now, one teacher is responsible for putting everyone else’s contribution together. I have already sent these groups information about using google docs to make this job easier.

I will be using google docs with each schools’ instructional technology teams as we work on developing plans for the next school year. This is a great example of “working on it anytime anywhere.” With teachers so overwhelmed with the amount of paperwork required of them these days, this will have to be a welcome change from years past.

Again, I am so impressed with this possibility. I am also using it for personal tasks. It would have been great to use in coordinating Christmas gifts with my family in Tennessee, or in coordinating a family get-together (who will be bringing what). My daughter and I are now using it to share thoughts with one another about educational and behavioral plans for her two sons on the autism spectrum. What a tool!

I am really enjoying my RSS feeds. I find something interesting every day! I have especially enjoyed the constant stream of information about Asperger’s Syndrome. I am finding a lot of irrelevant material on that feed, but I just roll on down to find something more interesting.

For professional purposes, I am finding so many great sites for students through recommendations on the blogs I am following. One particularly good one was on the first Thanksgiving. Lots of good and relevant material on the conditions the first Europeans settlers endured, and the help of the Wampanoag. Another good one was a listing of vocabulary and spelling games for young students.

The two links posted above came from a single blog post on the Successful Teaching blog, Useful Information In and Out of the Classroom. This blogger posts recommended sites under this post title every week. I certainly look forward to other recommendations from this blog.