Enjoying Symbaloo!

It has been a busy school year, that is my only excuse...bad blogger, I will increase my frequency! I have been enjoying a great homepage, book-marking, web tool called Symbaloo for a little over a year now. I cannot say enough great things about Symbaloo! I love the visual look of symbaloo. I have tried Diigo and Delicious, I find having a constant visual "button" to press rather than a list much more appealing. On the page that comes up on my PC and at my work computer are the links I click on the most, then I have tabs for my kids (which I can share publicly and they can set as their homepage). Here is my Symbaloo:

At the ICE conference, one of the presenters put all his presentation links on a Symbaloo page and shared it with the audience, so they could easily follow along. When introducing Web 2.0 tools to a class, this is a great way to share the sites for the presentation.  http://www.symbaloo.com/ 

Year-round School & Shiny New Tech Tools

I started working on August 3rd this year, my school has gone "Track E" or Year-Round". Of course not every Chicago Public School has done this, which is very inconvenient for those of us who have school age children in another school and a husband who also teaches both on a regular schedule. I keep hearing, "mommy where are you going, it's summer!" I found some research that shows this trend doesn't even work http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070811151449.htm

Hummm, we will see.

It was nice to arrive to my library/classroom to play with my new Hitachi StarBoard (interactive whiteboard)and the Elmo document camera that was attached to it. The kids are starry eyed when I turn it on. I can't wait to find some new ideas to use with them. So far I have used it to show a video clip that is related to the book I read them. I love the Dewey Decimal Rap I found at http://www.schooltube.com/video/a6f0e9bf883c6426497b/The-Dewey-Decimal-Rap

I have also had my little ones move the ABCs around the board into the alphabetical order. I plan to scan my first book with the Elmo next week and highlight some of the difficult words and link it to Google images as we read.

Any ideas?

PLN: blogs that have the most in Technology Trends

The blogs I find I get the most technology trends from include

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/
http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com
http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/
http://www.classroom20.com
http://www.teachgennow.com.au
http://www.kleinspiration.com

I also get A LOT of techie ideas from the people I follow on Twitter.

Just what I needed

I am making a video to apply for the Google Teacher Academy and I needed an illustration to show that I share. I found a free web 2.0 tool called Gliffy that creates charts and graphs.

Web 2.0 Teacher Tools

I have been trying to put all the web 2.0 online tools I use in my classroom all on one page in preparation for a course I am teaching in technology trends for Concordia University. If I am missing any very useful sites, please let me know.

Web 2.0 Tools

Meeting Marc Brown!

I had the very BIG pleasure of meeting Marc Brown this past week and it was awesome! He is such a nice, seemingly humble person. Very funny and entertaining with the K-2 students who got to see him. He posed for countless pictures and signed more than 100 books. His new book, Arthur Turns Green was the hot seller.

Teaching students to write...no more essays?

This is a thought-provoking notion discussed in this NYTimes article. What skills do our students need?

Teaching to the Text Message