Ch 3

After reading chapter three, I was inspired to try some new things. I have sent in the info to gaggle to set up my students with an email account that I can monitor. I also went ahead and contacted a teacher from a school where I used to work in Milwaukee (Atlas Prep). My hope is that we can do some collaboration between the two schools much like what was done in Ch 3 by Mr. Finley's class. Even though I have not thought about what project we would do together, I thought I should get the ball rolling. I also found that the geomar.de/omc site was a great map creation site for students. It just so happens that I had my students create maps of Egypt this week so I have included a link to that site on my classroom website. http://teacherweb.com/WI/TJMS/MrCowen/t.stm
Here is a question, should teachers maintain their own websites? What are some good ones to use? I tried this teacherweb.com and it is $40 per year. That seemed reasonable since their site has many lessons and webquests.

Very interesting video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

During the first week of class we looked at some graphics programs. For example, we looked at Face in Hole, Go Animate, Inage Chec and Toon Doo just to name a few. It was fun to put our faces in the characters in the Face in Hole but I do not think I would be able to use that for my class due to the fact that they had some pictures that were not appropriate for 6th graders. (Hugh Heffner with some scantily dressed girls) I also uploaded a powerpoint to Empresser and had some fun with that. I can see how that would be very useful for presentations in the classroom. I also used the 280 slide program and created a short presentation for about my class.
I must say that the option to save to the net is what really interested me. I have a computer at home, one at work, one for class, and visit computers all over the place. It amazes me that we can now save large amounts of infomation to the net and be able to access it from anywhere we want.