LANGWITCHES' Blog

This is another highly informative blog to which I have subscribed:

http://www.langwitches.org/blog/

As she describes herself:

"LANGWITCHES' Blog contains thoughts, ideas and projects on my journey as a Technology Integration Facillitator.

My name is Silvia Tolisano. I was born in Germany, raised in Argentina and am living in the United States. I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Spanish with a Minor in International Studies and a Masters in Education with an emphasis in Instructional Technology.

My areas of interest include technology in the classroom and multicultural and global education."

Save Our Prairie

This is a blog site about globalwarming with a local concern.

Deidre Bonnycastle is an educational technologist (UofS grad) and an instructional designer for the College of Medicine at the UofS (aka a teacher teaching doctors - novel idea eh???) She has let me know about a blog http://prairiesaver.blogspot.com/

Esnips.com

Esnips.com is an online storage and sharing site. Everyone can sign up for a free account and get 5 gigs of online storage space. (Google gives you 1 gig?) The idea of this site is that you will share things like video and images; however you can set the preferences so that nothing is shared. I've been using this recently to upload my school files for backup. So far, so good. I know I could save things to my flash drive, but dang it, then I would have to know where it is at all times.

Holiday Surfing Finds

I've found a few cool things as I've surfed over the holidays.


Paint. Net I tried downloading this onto my laptop. It seems to be more like GIMP than MS Paint is. http://www.getpaint.net/

Pete's Online Typing Lessons These seem to work well (depending on your connection speed).
http://www.typing-lessons.org/


Well, back to coffee - part two - and more surfing.

TeacherTechBlog

I've subscribed to TeacherTechBlog http://teachertechblog.com/ It seems (so far) to be a very practical blog for teachers in the K-12 community.

A good blog entry to start on is "The Best of 2007" http://teachertechblog.com/the-best-of-2007/130/

I'm going through it right now and have found some useful tidbits.

Technology Shopping Cart

I subscribe to Google Alerts, one of which is under the ambiguous topic "K-12" Educational Technology.Very rarely do I get anything of note; however I did stumble across this blog "Technology Shopping Cart" http://techshoppingcart.blogspot.com/ which seems to be a promising place to stop by once in awhile. It is even in a podcast (I'll have to check out iTunes).

Have a Joyeux Noel!

Grade 5 and Six Skyped with Students in Illinois!

I spent most of my Thursday afterschool trying to set up the Dell laptop connected to the data projector working with Skype. Hmmm....after 3 hours (or so after skyping Donna numerous times interrupting her while she worked on her master's project and ate supper) we seemed to get it to work. It seems that the Dell I have has a built-in microphone and the headset just didn't want to work with skype. My MacBook worked PERFECTLY but I don't have a connection cord to the data projector.

The next morning, I was able to skype the teacher, Mr. Bill Theobald, in Waterloo Illinois. THEY start classes at 8:00 AM! All my grade five and sixes piled into the library at 9:05 (I had warned them that I didn't know what to expect) and promptly the pre-setup Dell had somehow unset itself up. We had no luck with it...so we went back to my tiny Mac...and it WORKED. The kids had a blast. They did get to talk to some of their epals; as well after the classes changed there they talked to some 6th graders.

Anyhow, THANKS DONNA!

We definitely want to do this again.

By the way, we connected with the Waterloo Illinois class via Epals www.epals.com A teacher can get 35 free email accounts with this service and access to classes all over the world. I've been doing Epals with my social studies classes for about three years now with mixed results. If the class writes back on a regular basis it is a wonderful experience; if not the kids get frustrated. This year, I've agreed to exchange with pretty much any class that's written to us. Waterloo Illinois has been the most faithful correspondants. Check out the city site at http://www.waterloo.il.us/