How do you incorporate the technology standards in your district.  http://www.techplan.org/literacy.html This link has a checklist that would be very helpful to make sure you covered all of the required areas, however, it is a lot. 

 One idea I have is to use any of the standards that use the verb ‘discuss’ or ‘identify’ as writing prompts either in the classroom or on our classroom website.  Hopefully, this will start discussions and deeper thinking about the topic.

How else can all these standards be incorporated into the curriculum?

WOW! I love the idea of using the Internet to teach without wasting classrom time searching (or surfing).  Check out the WebQuest that I created at http://zunal.com/webquest.php?user=33412. On my quest to create I came across a plethora of great WebQuests.  Have others used these in the classrooms?  What were your experiences?  How did you manage the classroom environment and maintain a timeline? 

 I’m starting to get excited for September!

internet-safety-teacher-presentation.ppt

Internet Safety Tips for Students

I created two PowerPoint presentations to bring awareness to ethics and safety issues of Internet use. Both have notes at the bottom of each slide so anyone could present this in a school setting.

 With the Internet becoming the number one mode of research, what are other schools doing to teach Internet safety and ethics?

Over the summer, our school is installing a district-wide program: Moodle in the Classroom.  This site, www.moodle.org, will allow different kinds of communication.I will not have a website until our training in August, but I would like to focus on writing skills by having the students comment to blogs that I post about activities or comment on podcasts of students reading their own writing. I am looking forward to this type of communication that will take my students inside and outside of the classroom.

 Do other schools use similar classroom websites?  Have you done an activity that you love and works well?  One that did not?  I would love to get some ideas about what to start with on my website when I create it.  Let me know how you integrated this technology tool into your instruction.

Research shows that Students that write for an audience that interests them are far more interested in writing. In several studies students had significant improvements in their state writing scores when they had online pen pals. They found the students were motivated to write to a peer somewhere else in the world (Warlick 2005).

Has anyone used an online pen pal web site?  I have signed up for www.ePals.com and would like to implement this activity in my classroom next year.  Are there any tips to making the project successful?  Anyone use a different site that they like? 

I used movie maker to create a movie of the 5th grade students at camp.  I can’t post that one because of media release issues, but I did do another smaller one of my own children to send to my husband (who is gone a couple weeks at a time). 5-20-09-end-of-year-picnic.WMV Before I figured out Movie Maker I used Microsoft Power Point.  I had difficulties adding a video clip from my file to the power point, it was easier in Movie Maker.

I have used Power Point for presentations in the classroom, but not Movie Maker.  What have others done to incorporate these multimedia presentation formats into their classes?

My goal for this summer is to learn several new (to me) technology tools. Hopefully I will be able to incorporate one or two of them into my 5th grade classroom.  I started with the MP3 player last week, mostly because I wanted to learn it for myself, not my class. However, I have heard of using the voice recording to help reading fluency, but that is another blog altogether.

I wanted to download music and an audible book. I learned alot about different audio files by failure, but two MP3 players later (because the first super cheap one wasn’t compatible with audible.com), I think I have the basic ideas down. 

Is there really any free music out there? What is a torrent file, anyway?  What purpose could an MP3 or Ipod have in the classroom (besides the headphones, that my students used for laptops this past year)?

Next up: movie maker.