My Week, 10/26

It was a quieter, "let's catch up on some things" week.

 
On Monday, I attended MS Office 2007 Training, which we are switching to next year.  We discussed new features and also plans for training in our buildings.  The rest of the day, I spent catching up from my day off, going through emails, and updating our Six Kingdom website, which took more time than I thought it would.

Tuesday, I worked on completing my agenda for our next airliner integration session that occurred on Wednesday, and finished up the lesson for the CTE e-portfolios for Thursday and Friday.  I also did some research on DE Streaming Science.

On Wednesday, I did the airliner session during grade level planning periods and a few other odds and ends around my office.

Then on Thursday and today, I am working with the 8th grade CTE students on their home pages for their e-portfolios using iweb and then helped staff with some questions and/or technical difficulties. 

Overall, a good week!  I am on the hunt for some new units to help plan soon!  What do you have coming up in your curriculum that you have ideas for?  Or do you need ideas?  Share in the comments below. I'd be glad to help out!

Photo "Elements of My Perfect Little Notebook" found on Flickr, uploaded by Patrick Ng.

My Week, 10/19/09

Cutest Koala
Originally uploaded by Erik K Veland

What a busy week! I keep saying that, don't I? This week was full of professional development and some really cool Science posters!

On Monday, I had a staff session on Social Bookmarking, where I explained to teachers in my building that social bookmarking is a way to organize and store your favorite websites and share them with others. We talked about Google bookmarks, Portaportal, Delicious, Diigo, and StumbleUpon. I haven't quite figured out that last one and really stick with Delicious and Diigo. Is there anyone out there that uses StumbleUpon? If so, why do you use it or what is that you like about it? Come convince me!

The teachers who attended thought this was a great way to share resources! Here are some of the comments they had to share:
From our guidance counselor, Amy:

"I think it's great! I'm always finding pages and bookmarking them and then I can't find them when I go to a different computer. These will be wonderful!"

From one of our 8th grade teachers, Deborah:

"I think it will be a convenience to me because I will have material readily available to me whether I'm at work or at home".

My presentation from Monday is uploaded here.

Last week, I hinted at using the program Comic Life for this week. So on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I worked with the 7th grade Science classes using Comic Life to create posters of the Six Kingdoms: Archeabacteria, Eubacteria, Fungi, Protista, Plantae, and Animalia. See what I learned this week? The students had a great time and I loved seeing them help one another with the program. Each poster was truly a spirit of themselves and their creativity-there isn't one that looks alike. They discovered fonts I didn't know about. Three or four students found fonts that looked like animal tracks or had borders to go around their letters for the title. I think all of us thought they did a great job and now that they know the program, we are already thinking of what they can use it for next!

Which brings me to Friday! Well...I'm taking a break and I'm headed to Radford, one of my favorite places and my college. Have a great weekend!

Busy Week!

Ice Cream
Originally uploaded by Ms Cupcake

It's been a busy week! It started with our Differentiation Day on Monday, where our librarian and myself helped teachers learn how to use Schoolfusion more effectively. We even had time to talk about some web 2.0 tools that could be embedded, such as Blabberize, Voki's, My Studyio, and Glogster (if it's not blocked). Everyone seemed impressed with Blabberize especially. I've received great feedback! Some discussions from the day however, led me to realize that I may need to provide some workshop time on basic tools with Office products, especially Word and PowerPoint. Our librarian was willing to help me with those sessions and I would love the chance to collaborate more with her.

On Tuesday, I worked with our art teacher to start documenting samples of student work for an e-portfolio project our CTE and art classes will be piloting this year. I worked with both the eighth grade classes and soon we will be using PhotoShop Elements to crop pictures and do another project where the students will add filters and manipulate digital photos.

Wednesday was quieter as I was in a TRT meeting in the morning and finished up preparing for the Study Island training session for Thursday afternoon.

On Thursday, I worked with the Science teachers to prepare for the Comic Life project and prepared for the Airliner Training on practice writing for Friday.

Which leads me to today, where I worked on the Study Island Training Video and stopped by some classrooms to see what everyone was up to. I saw a great lesson on discounts in a 7th grade classroom. They reviewed percentages and discounts in their warm-up activity and then "went" to the Ice Cream Parlor and had $25 each to buy as much ice cream as they wanted. BUT, they had to remember that the $25 included a 5% tax and 15% tip. Then they had to calculate how much money they had left over. It was very interesting to see the students helping each other and then get frustrated when they figured up their order and had to take something off because they didn't have enough money left over for the tip! I thought this would be a great smart activity, as well. 8th grade was also doing discounts and I saw one 8th grade teacher using the Smartboard and had a graph with Sales price, discount price, and total price and the students had to figure out the total price and write it on the Smartboard.

Like I said, busy week!  How was yours?