Love the blog, especially the video from Teacher Tube on having kids blog, I'm trying to get that going in my own district over here.

Edmodo seems like a great starting place.
http://www.edmodo.com/

He Melissa, I just am now realizing that you are collaborating w/ Jen's class from FV in Mt Prospect. What a small world, I met you a long long time ago on here and used to work w/ Jen in a round about way. I'm so glad to see you guys doing what you are doing, it is such a great idea that I hope to incorporate into my new district in WI.

I'll leave this for Jen too, but Ustream might be the way for you guys to go on any type of collaboration. You can stream video live so she can see you or Vice Versa, and you can even create a chat room along w/ it to see the video and chat at the same time.

http://www.ustream.tv/

Also, if you have iChat then you can do it automatically. Plus, Text Flow is a great way to collaborate on Text Documents, it is called Parrallel Word Processing.

http://textflow.com/

Good luck, and can't wait to see how you too continue to bridge the gap between technology and education.

Melissa - Did you every do a project with your third graders using google docs? I started looking at it for my fourth graders and it says that students have to be 13 years old in order to use it. I sort of want to ignore that and use it anyway but wasn't sure...

Melissa,

Thanks for accepting my invitation. I am sending you a pdf of the first 5 chapters. If you send me an address to send the book, I will do so (antwonlincoln@mac.com).

Also check out the podcast (click here)
Website: www.tlconfessions.com

Confessions_Purchase.pdf

Any feedback would be much appreciated. And most importantly. I hope the book inspires you!

Sincerely,
Antwon

I would love to know the details of the project you did with your third graders using google docs. Thank you!

Eve

Melissa,
Very impressed with your work...it looks great! Are there any fifth grade teachers at your school that are this creative? I'd love to have a class to collaborate with via Skype sometime this school year. Google docs was a great idea as was the wiki. :-)

I couldn't live without my board! I left my charger for my laptop at home the other day and had to use dry erase after lunch....didn't think I'd make it through the day!:-) I am a Mac convert myself. I didn't know anything about them until coming to the school that I am currently at five years ago. Now, I'd never go back to a PC. We recently bought a new computer for home and went with Mac there to. I use iWeb to create my webpage and it is about as simple as it gets. I spent about 25 minutes on it this morning and changed the entire look of my site. The way all of the applications are streamlined makes it extremely simple. Do you ever use Skype when you're collaborating with the other class? I'm just becoming familiar with it and we're using it as a grade level right now (just teachers). I think it's great. If I could get more teachers at my school on the tech bandwagon (nearly impossible), we could use it schoolwide and google docs too...I'm a little obsessed with technology..sigh...

Thanks for your help. I loved the Halloween story your kids collaborated on. It completely convinced me to try google docs. Thank you for your help.

Melissa, Just a quick question..I'm trying to get responses from teachers I know have experience with wikis. I've just created my first one. How did you add your students as members so they can add and edit?