Drills

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I know drills, fire, tornado, and lock down are important. I’m glad the community is looking into the best way to protect the students during a disaster. The district, fire, EMTs, and police are doing drills with the school. It is just couldn’t we have done this last semester spread out over time? Couldn’t we do it after April? Do we have to have multiple drills and swimming in the weeks before the state TAKS?

Why does my school get stuck with having 4^th grade swimming the 2 weeks before the writing TAKS every single year? It isn’t the same as having specials because with transport it takes 1 hour 15 to 1 hour 20 minutes instead of 45 minutes.

We are getting phones

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Honestly a phone is the last on my list of Tech wants for my classroom. There are plenty of things I need to teach that should be coming before phones.

1st I need the building and portables wired for an alarm system. How many thousands of dollars do we have to lose to theft before something basic is done? Though they got zip in the last break in – only because we move the equipment out of the portables and into the building each night.

Next I need the wifi to work in the portables that house our older students and be open for the i-touches and personal computers. If people can sit at the HS tennis courts and get on line through school wi fi, how come our portables can’t?

Then I need projectors in all the classrooms, because the TV’s on my campus are useless for showing things on the computer. We are supposed to be using the computer based math curriculum, but the kids can only see a fuzzy mess on the screen.

After that I want the new printers. Can they print legal as well as 8.5 x 11 paper? I spent an hour hand feeding legal sized paper to my classroom printer for a report my principal needed. I had a ton of other things I could have been doing, instead of feeding in one sheet at a time.

I know our IT people have no control over this. It is the board and vendors that cause the road blocks, but it is frustrating to see things that aren’t needed rolled out while the things we need are held up in red tape. Dell has to spec out each room for the projectors. That is going to take years. In the meanwhile we get programs and licenses that I’m sure cost tens of thousands of dollars – to do things I can do on Google for free.

Response to Little Kids, Big Possibilities

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http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=440

I have changed my lesson plans for tomorrow to include http://www.wallwisher.com/ that Kelly Hines spotlighted in her Little Kids, Big Possibilities presentation at the K-12 Online Conference. We are studying matter and the states of matter in science. I am going to divide the kids into groups of three and give each group a computer. I have 4 laptops and 3 desktops. I will appoint a computer driver for each one and that child will input the information. For my students doing this with a random draw works best because they feel it is fair. Once a student’s name is drawn it can’t go back in the draw until all students have a turn.

First I will challenge them to reflect over the hands on activities we completed last week, and write up their observations on the sticky notes. Next we will organize that information into a tree graph. Then students will be reorganized into hands on groups with our computer people evenly distributed. Over the week the students will complete different activities and answer research questions about states of matter. They will post their findings to the wall adding to the tree map.

I am worried as my class racks up hits on the site, it might come to the attention of networking and be blocked just based on traffic. I have an e-mail started and saved that shows how wall wisher meets our educational goals. I will add screen shots of the process to make my argument stronger.

Wall Wisher can make two methodologies our staff development department advocates much easier to use in a classroom. The first is thinking maps. The whole class can create an online thinking map using the post it notes. Since thinking maps are the main graphic organizers we use this is important. Another technique our staff development department wants us to use jigsaw. Well Wisher can make jigsawing much easier. Each group can post their information to Wall Wisher, and the whole group can organize it into a thinking map.

A Trip to Mars

A trip to mars
Skater64

I was getting ready to leave for mars. I packed food, my spacesuit and packed me desert for on the ride to mars. I went in the ship and got prepared. I got ready to takeoff to mars. They did a countdown 5, 4,3,2,1 blast off. I was proud of myself. I landed on mars then jumped out I did back flips. I was happy when I jumped out. I got bored and left to home. I got bored because there was nothing to do. They thanked me for going to mars for them. I was proud of myself.

Solving the problem

Solving the probmel

Originally uploaded by Kimberly_Herbert

I love using my Promethean board and projector. The problem is we are constantly turning the lights on and off ask kids try to take notes. I have kids that are low vision, dyslexic, dysgraphic, or who just never bring their glasses. So our inclusion aid brought in some small LED lanterns that run on AA batteries. It works great. The picture doesn’t do it justice. The kids love using them.

End of 1st Week

Well the first week is over. In the spirit of start as you are to go – I started with technology. The first day I had my homeroom class clean the writer pads, idle all last year, and put new batteries in them. Then they created their accounts and started their typing lessons. The second day my partner teacher was actually scheduled to use the writers, but she asked me to get the kids set up so I did. I know there are people that maintain we don’t need to teach keyboarding because the kids just get it. My kids don’t have computers at home. They need some formal practice or they won’t be able to keep up at the Middle school, JH, or HS.

We are scheduled to have the cart of laptops every 6 days and the cart of writers every 6 days. Also I’m assigning each table to a computer each day, rotating so no one group gets stuck with the silver laptop that is as slow as all get out every day.

We haven’t used the laptops, yet. We will be using them Monday. I also had my kids that have oral administration of their tests use the iPods while taking the 4^th grade placement test today. One child has sound issues and didn’t like using them. So aide took her to resource. The other two seemed to like the autonomy of working at their own pace. They did take the ear buds out between questions. I find ear buds to be very uncomfortable, so I expected that. I look forward to integrating more technology into the classroom each week.

I need to borrow the cameras from the Tech department, to have the kids photograph experiments and other lessons in class. I plan to start that in the next week or so.

We also had some tech fails. The on line grade is still a mess with the wrong people assigned to classes as teachers meaning I can’t take care of my grades for the Leos because their homeroom teacher is the teacher of record for math and science.

First Day with Kids

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Today was our first day with kids. I just had my homeroom today. They are a pretty good bunch. We spent most to the day working on our social contract, which I need to print out. They decided on the team name Pegasus Galaxy, partially my fault. They voted for Pegasus, but we have the Pegasus Program for disabled children. So I was trying to say Pegasus Constellation but my brain got stuck in the Stargate Universe and I kept saying Pegasus Galaxy.

Night out

I just spent a wonderful evening at Melissa & Phillip’s house. Loren and Brett were as sweet as can be. Brett loves to sit on the couch with my I-phone and look at the pictures of family members. Loren plays games on it. First she had to put on a show. I should have gotten some video of it. I did get some of her and Brett saying suuuppper staaars for my introduction video. I need to go finish that now.

When Rights Clash

http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2009/08/21/294472ilutisticstudentsdoglawsuit_ap.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mrss

COLUMBIA, Ill. (AP) — A Monroe County judge says a southwestern Illinois school district must allow a 5-year-old autistic boy to bring his service dog to class.

I understand this child’s rights. I’m just wondering what about kids like me when I was little. I am still very allergic to some types of dogs. Depending on the breed I might not be able to be on the same wing, even now as an adult. I would have trouble breathing. Then sinus and lung infections could set in. My skin would react. It would be raw and inflamed. Then secondary infections

Image by kris247 via Flickr

would set in.

Has anyone ever been in a situation that had to balance the needs of different children were serious health risks were involved?

Day 5 of Teachers Back

It was a good day. I got my room together. My terrific teammates got our Pod common space decorated. I forgot to take pictures. I am not a foo foo person, decorating is NOT my thing. One of the two bulletin boards is set up for AR points contest. The other is going to be a star student bulletin board – but now is set up to introduce the teachers and our aid.