04 October 2010

Fall break is almost upon us . . .

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting with the new STLP group at the middle school.  As usual, I always learn something being around the students!  Below I have included a link to a really cool Web site where you can change text easily and for free!  The students shared this site with me and I had a lot of fun playing around with my own name and seeing all the different ways I could change it and save it to use.  It's neat!

On Friday I spent some time with the teachers from the technology committee at the primary school.  We went over the basics of starting a Web page with SchoolLoop and I am proud to announce that they found it easy to learn and use and several of them now have a Web page posted.  Over the rest of this month, I'm hoping we can get more teachers trained so we can start seeing lots of teacher pages up and running.

I also attended a Webinar on "101 Tech Tools for Teachers" on Friday afternoon.  I learned a great deal about sites, especially those that are FREE, that teachers can use in their classrooms.  As part of attending that Webinar, I was able to download an e-book which contains lots of Web sites and information for teachers.  I will be sharing sites from that e-book and from the Webinar this week, so enjoy exploring them!

My schedule for this week - I will meet with the schools' TRTs on Tuesday afternoon at the elementary school.  I have another Webinar on Wednesday at noon and will be meeting with the STLP group again on Wednesday afternoon at the middle school.  I hope to spend some time this week working on trainings for teachers on SchoolLoop, getting some information out to teachers about Thinkfinity training, working on the Civil Rights Data Collection for our district, and all my other normal activities and duties!

Here are some sites to check out this week:

Storybird - collaborative storytelling
Bibme - a fully automatic bibliography maker
Kideos - a kid friendly place for videos (search for Star Wars A Capella - it's great!; also look for 44 Presidents Rhyme - interesting if you are a history teacher!)


And the one given to me by the middle school students . . . CoolText - a free graphics generator


Hope you have a great week and remember, fall break is just around the corner!