My thanks to Christine Southard who shared this mid-year check-up via plurk. Christine is a fellow DEN Star in my Personal Learning Network (PLN). For those of you who don’t know, the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC)is the largest international professional organization dedicated to improving the educational success of individuals with disabilities and/or gifts and talents. I maintained my membership in the CEC while I worked in educational diagnostics when I lived in New York.
The CEC maitains a blog for first year teachers, and while I would like to direct this post to the many new teachers that I am working with, the information is truly applicable to all. Their recent post “Your Mid-year Check-Up” includes some questions that you might want to consider. Now is certainly a great time to assess the physical, academic, and social environments in your classroom. It is also a good time to take stock of how you are coping with what life looks like right now. Sometimes we need to make changes mid-year to avoid burnout.
With all of the rush in December, I never got a chagnce to post the new voicthreads that folks did. Ms. Bass at Victory used Voicethreads to do a project on animal adaptations. It’s her kids first attempt at Voicethreads. I think they did pretty good for a first try:
Then of course there is Mrs. Taxson over at Brighton who is always pushing the envelope. She worked on a Voicethread with her first graders all on her own. I heard about it AFTER she was done and needed help putting it on her blog…take a look at her post.
Here’s another gem I got from Al Beamon. This Animal Habitat TechQuest was created by a a teacher in Fairfax County so it is aligned with the SOL. If you use the activity, be sure to make alternate arrangements for the quiz. the online version of the quiz emails results directly to Mr. Rossen.
My personal learning network has lots of different sources. A TRT in Kentucky shared a link to an online booklet on how teachers could help children of military cope with the changes surrounding deployment. Given our population, i thought this would be great to share with you all: An educator’s guide to working with military kids
Many of you know Al Beamon, he taught 4th grade for many years at Brighton before he became a TRT. Quite glad he joined our team as he’s a really talented guy with great aptitude for the job. every once in a while Al shares a resource that he has found and is using over a James Hurst Elementary. So Al’s most recent share was for animal habitats. GlaxoSmithKline has created a website on animal habitats. Check it out I’m sure it will be helpful.
Whew!! I’m trying to clean out my inbox. The email upgrade has made life very different for many of us. If you need help with the new interface, let me know or you could take the OWA 2007 class that is being offered in the Tech Tuesday lineup.
So anyway, I’m cleaning up my email and I ran across some info on a great site. The Virginia Trekkers are a group of Instructional Technology Resource Teachers who are creating resources for elementary students. The vodcasts and interactives are primarily targeted towards social studies, but where there is an cross over with other core areas, they make sure to get that in as well. Check out the site…there is something for everyone K-6.
If you’ve ever met Nancy Butler you know she is a giving soul. I just looked at her latest post and had to share it with you. 10 Gifts that keep on giving I’m hoping that her teachers take advantage of those gifts. I hope all of you take advantage of those gifts…WOOT!!
So during my SL adventure tonite, someone made a reference to Wordle. I learned about this application earlier this year, but never posted about it (that I could remember). I think using this application would be a cool way to teach students about Main Idea. The application make a word cloud from your text. Words that occur with more frequency are larger in the cloud. Like a tag cloud. I think this might be a great application to help students learn about summarization too. So I took my post about Warlick and turned it into a wordle:
My thanks to Christine Southard who shared this mid-year check-up via plurk. Christine is a fellow DEN Star in my Personal Learning Network (PLN). For those of you who don’t know, the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) is the largest international professional organization dedicated to improving the educational success of individuals with disabilities and/or gifts and talents. I maintained my membership in the CEC while I worked in educational diagnostics when I lived in New York. 
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