Unit Ideas

Here is a list of the websites I’ve found so far that relate to our unit:

Simile lesson plan: http://www.education-world.com/a_tsl/archives/07-1/lesson001.shtml

Descriptive Writing/Art lesson plan:http://www.education-world.com/a_tsl/archives/07-1/lesson004.shtml

Some symbolism ideas: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070530142157AAXJVrv

Color symbolism: http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/color2.htm

Cultural Symbols: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/06/g68/symbols.html

Techno Workshop Links

We had a really cool technology workshop today. We learned more about NoteShare. (The 6th grade teachers really want this!) We also got a bunch of awesome links to utilize. The first link below is the agenda of the workshop and contains all of the links. The second and third are two links that I found most interesting.

http://region6.mainelearns.org/web2.html – Agenda and links

http://writeboard.com/ – Virtual whiteboard

http://www.skype.com/download/skype/macosx/ – Site to download Skype

Wiki!

I just made my first Wiki at wikispace.com. I’ve just barely started it, but I plan to check it out at school to see if it is blocked before I go too far with the development.

I’m beginning to wonder what the differences are between a wiki and a blog. I think I read that’s coming up on the course syllabus. Will be good to know.

Bloggin’ 101

Hello!

Ok, so this is how you blog.

I guess I’ll start my first blog and my first reflection by saying that the process of finding a blog site (that was not blocked by the school server) and the initial development of the blog space was not all that hard to do. It really is much like setting up a web page or a photo gallery. It also seems that posting to the blog is really easy, too. Hopefully, it will be smooth sailing from here on out. (Addition: I did spent quite a bit of time figuring out sidebars after I wrote this message.

Janet asked me why I decided to do my reflections on a blog. It was a good question. I could just as easily word process my thoughts and print them out. I guess my motivation for creating this blog comes from three places. 1. I have a desire to learn about this whole “blogmania” as it is very popular in both the educational and popular culture realms. 2. My wedding photographer has a really awesome blog, and I have been spending a lot of time lurking on her site. After viewing the ease at which she communicates with her clients, other photographers, and friends, I decided that I may want to create a blog for my own use. 3. Also, I’ve been just amazed at the speed at which my students are able to learn and use technology. I am also amazed by how attentive they are when they are using the web or even word processing in my social studies and language arts classes. Based on that, I have been thinking about creating a blog to post a discussion of classroom topics. This opportunity to blog for class seemed like a reasonable way to learn about the technology and find uses for it in my professional and personal life.

So, I guess I will give this a go and see what works and what glitches arise. So far, so good!