English Assingment for Week of June 29th

Your English assingment for this week is to read in our literature books pages 34-45 and answer questions 1-5 on page 45. I also want you to think about an andventure you had once like Huck Finn in the story you read. We will be working on these essays next week so make sure that you have a web for class on Monday.

If you have any questions as always just shoot me an email or look on the class calendar for a reminder of upcoming tests.

TeacherWeb

http://www.teacherweb.com/

TeacherWeb is a website where teachers can go to and set up a virtual classroom. You can use TeacherWeb for a variety of different helpful classroom tools. You can have a blog, set up a class calendar, have homework pages, have quizzes online so your students could make up quizzes they missed right online. TeacherWeb also is user friendly so communication with parents would be easy. Another cool little tool is TeacherWeb is gradebook compatiable so you could keep your grade reports online so you wouldn't have to worry whether you saved your grades on your computer as school or at home, with TeacherWeb you could have it on your website so it could be accessible from anywhere, a convientant tool to use where ever you are.

Also, on TeacherWeb it is possible to share documents, and as we learned from GoogleDocs that would be an useful tool in incorporating class collaberation as well parent involvement. A potential draw back to TeacherWeb however is that it is not free. There is a charge of $39.00 per year, but when you factor in how much easier and organized your classroom would be, that is a small price to keep you from going crazy.

Another great tool on this website is the ability to find teachers from across the country. I think that this could lead to unlimited possibilities for your classroom to be connected to classrooms from many different states. Geography lessons would be so much fun. When learning about another state you could look up a teacher that teaches the same grade and you could have a joint lesson with that classroom and get real hands on material. You could have the students from the different state teach each other about their own state which would help the students in your classroom learn about their state better as well because they would be presenting material to the other students.

This is a fun website and one that after looking around it for a while and reading the different testimonials one that I will look into when I get my own classroom. There is a trial 30 day run and I signed up for this to demonstrate what this fun tool looks like! Check it out HERE!

Podcasting

Podcasts are a great way to help incorporate technology as a tool that can give proper instruction as well clear detailed instructions that come straight from the teacher's mouth. The podcasts are a great and multidimensional tool that can link teachers to their students outside of the classroom as well the parents of their students.


Here is a link to my podcast.

Creative Commons

Photo Attribution:

Original Image: "Sea of Tranquility"
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1019/1040242302_2b2ea79080_m.jpg
By: Storm Crypt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivitives License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en


Incorporating images into our teaching is such a valuable tool to utilize. There are students who are better visual learners and by using images we can ensure our lessons are reaching all our students. Images also help make lessons more interesting and fun. Students can see what it is that we are trying to teach them about so they will be engaged in the lessons. These are all very important aspects of teaching that can be used by simple imagery added in.


Check out a pic from Spring Break 09 of me and the guys out to dinner.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39423572@N03/3625795796/

Image Manipulation

http://api.photoshop.com/home_263d5dfbe34e4d808efb96363f1dc6f2/adobe-px-assets/b2acb4c6314647d882ac0ca1f1226e73

Photoshop express I feel could be a fun tool to work with in the classroom because you could liven up normally boring images. An example of this would be taking a famous history scene and adding actual text bubbles to the historic figures mouths.
Here is an example of what I did with it.

Blogs and RSS

I was not familiar with RSS readers before this assignment but I can definitely see the benefits to using them. Teachers using blogs is a great way to keep the kids up to date with what is going on in the classroom. Parents can also monitor what is going on so they are up to date as well which I feel is very vital. Blogs are a great way also for other students to develop better relationships with their peers and also learn from their peers as well. I know for me, it is easier to read criticism than to hear it out loud and vise versa it is easier to write it down on paper than it is to tell someone to their face.

The RSS readers are a great tool to use. I know for myself from experience it is a tedious process looking through a website looking for new information and with the RSS readers it is so much easier. Even in my personal use like looking on a sports website it gets boring sorting through information that I have already read and often I get frustrated and just quit, but with the readers the new information is brought right to you. I think that this is a great tool to use with children as well because in a way it monitors what they are reading and looking up so that we as teachers can ensure that our students are getting the most updated and new information quickly.