Welcome...

Hi Katie. I was wondering if your students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. If not, perhaps you have some other educator contacts you could direct me to. You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

Hello,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this virtual Ning network is no exception. My name is Andy Pethan. I am a 21 year old student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin students (near Boston) who is taking a year off to pursue our interests in education, entrepreneurship, design and technology, bringing us to the logical project of a business that designs collaborative software for schools! I found you in a search for "middle school", and since our project is specific to middle schools, I thought you might be interested. Our project is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

We are working under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media and tools: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum, and internet-based software. We hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. More importantly, and unlike many of our competitors, our software will empower teachers to better integrate higher level thinking skills, individualized learning, goal setting, reflection, and effective feedback and evaluation. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2008, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools and individual teachers will want to use to improve their students' learning in and out of the classroom.

Our team is currently trying to win an idea competition on Ideablob.com You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975. We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start. Note that winning this contest will raise $10,000, a large and useful sum of money for a web-based company running on “sweat equity” and minimal costs.

Feel free to email me back, post on my profile, check out alightlearning.com, or do anything you like!

Thanks,
Andy Pethan
rockychat3@gmail.com

I am an elementary tech apps teacher, so I don't know if these websites will apply, but here goes....

We use some really fun interactive keyboarding activities with our kiddos. Try a few of these on for size:

http://funschool.kaboose.com/fun-blaster/back-to- school/games/game_super_hyper_spider_typer.html

www.typingmaster.com/games

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/

Let me know if any of these help! :)

Hi, Katie! I have taught 7th & 8th grade Computers and Technology class the last couple of years. I have some great Excel ideas that focus on spreadsheet outcomes/standards if you are interested. I love finding new (and fun) ways to use Excel-- the kids loved it too. Let me know if you are interested.

If you'd like to meet, do you want to come to TPLC or me to come to EMS? As an old teacher there, it may be weird for me to come back, talking to a newbie (like I still have my claws in there). If you came to me, you'd get all the "street cred" for bringing the info in. Anytime after the 7th will work for me!

Katie, the state of Utah has a nice site with a ton of keyboarding ideas and resources...

http://www.schools.utah.gov/ATE/keyboarding/key.htm

Hope it helps...have a great school year...RR

YEAH!! I'm so excited to get another digital storyteller!! =) That program is so much fun! I found that my 5-6th graders didn't always like to draw either! But, they could upload pictures (from home or taken at school), use pictures from the web (http://www.pics4learning.com/), or use a computer drawing program (KidPix, Tux Paint http://www.tuxpaint.org/, or just Microsoft Paint. I have found that they may not like to draw on paper, but they do enjoy doing it on the computer. The KEY is to save pictures in JPEG format. Others may be allowed, but I have not searched for all of them. I would guess that a .GIF format would work as well. I would start with a project about family and friends to get them hooked...7th graders would LOVE to talk about themselves and their friends, that is all that is important...right?! ;) Then they could just use their own pictures or take them at school with the school cameras.

Your job sounds fun!! =) I think I would start with simple tasks that tell you what they KNOW about different programs. I built a Word document that had my teachers use different features of Word to complete a certain tasks. For Excel, have students make a graph with data (even collected in your room with a simple survey would be fun). Have them make all the parts of the graph, change the background color, and add different effects! Students could create a PowerPoint slide with information, remember that could be exported into Photo Story to build a story. I have other sites I could send, when I'm on my computer again! =) Good luck with that, it will be fun!!

I love this classroom 2.0! I am going to build a site on www.ning.com for my teachers to join, so we can form a community. Then, I'll build one for our school for students and parents to join and start talking and sharing on! I have 1st grade this year or I would have a ning site for my personal classroom...AND I may still do that for communicating and sharing with parents! I was also excited about the KanEd site webpages they are offering for teachers...it is $12 a year (at least through today-they are on sale) and they are in simple format, allow blogging and attachments, and much more! The cool thing about the KanEd site is that your students have to have a log in to access certain parts of the site and that helps to make it safe!

Keep asking, I love to send and receive ideas!! =)

Good luck and stay in touch!

OH MY GOODNESS! Why didn't you say something when we were there! Congrats on the new job--EMS has such potential for new teachers! (and the Principal is truly a good guy)
You're welcome to come visit TPLC, either in RL or virtually. I'd love to share with you some good free tools that really get kids going! and can even make keyboarding SO MUCH MORE rewarding!