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March 17, 2004: Today was the second
day of the NJ ASK test. I am very proud of my students and
all of their hard work! Although I have been working hard
to prepare them for the NJ ASK, I was somehow able to find time
to play on Contribute. I have been updating my site using
Contribute by adding picture prompts, displaying students'
work, and adding cute images to the pages (because we all just love
the little dancing images)! Although I am new to all of this,
I feel pretty comfortable with it. Also, the compliments I
have been receiving from my peers are making it all worth while!
I cannot wait for testing to be over so I can get my kids starting
on my new activities online!
March
18, 2004: Yesterday after school, the Star-W team met for
a "using Macromedia Contribute" meeting/workshop.
It went extremely well. It really helps when everyone is so
enthusiastic about working and learning more about Contribute.
One thing that I learned was to use "tables" in the web
pages. I just tried it out today on my "Resources"
page during my lunch. It looks much better now that I don't
have all of my links going straight down the page! I am eager
to read through the hand-out I received to learn more fun tricks
to make my sites look more professional and eye-catching!
March
19, 2004: Well, we are done testing! Today I put labels
on the kids' computers with their names and a little picture.
Just a little thing like that got the students all excited about
using the computers!
March
25, 2004: Art came in today during our prep periods to show
us more about putting prompts up by using Contribute. Since
I already have plenty up and running (yes, once i start working
on a new thing it is hard to pry my fingers off of the keyboard),
I decided to use that time to look up more fun educational web sites
for the kids. I added a few more to my "Resources"
area on my page. After prep, I put the children into their
reading groups and explained the day's activities. I first
went into extreme detail about the first picture prompt that I have
online on my page. This was the first time the kids would
be doing a picture prompt that I created, so I wanted to make sure
they were comfortable with it. The students absolutely loved
my first picture prompt! They seem more focused when they
type their responses. While I had one group of 5 students
on the computers working on the prompts, a 2nd group was at the
listening center with a sheet of questions to answer about the story.
The 3rd group worked with me on our reading carpet. We were
sounding out new words and learning their meanings. The groups
alternated around the room every 20 minutes until each group was
able to visit each learning center. They enjoyed it so much
that they asked me if they could do another one of my picture prompts
tomorrow!
March
30, 2004: I absolutely LOVE what Miss Castaldi did with organizing
her activities that she created with the student. She inspired
me to do the same! Today I created a table and put a different
month of the school year in a different cell. Each month also
has a cute clip art to represent that month. I also created
2 April activities: April Fool's Day and Earth Day.
The students can find them just by clicking the "April"
button on the "calendar" I made. It also makes it
easy to access at a later date. Next April, for example, I
won't have to create new scavenger hunts. The two hunts will
still be on the "April" page! Slowly but surely
I am getting my activities organized and easily accessible!
April
1, 2004: Today I had the students complete my April Fool's
Day scavenger hunt. They seemed to have a great time learning
what children do in other countries to play jokes on people.
However, no matter how much I went into detail about how to click
the "submit" button AFTER the complete the whole thing,
they still clicked it before they even started! So, instead
of having 16 or 20 emails with their answers (since their answers
are submitted to my email account), I received about 50 emails!
I won't even go into the drama about how I had to open them all
and figure out which were "junk" and which were the real
thing!
May 1, 2004:
Yes, you read that correctly...May 1st...SATURDAY! We are
just so dedicated! First of all, I cannot believe I went a
whole month without writing in my journal. I will try not
to let that happen again! Second, I am so happy that we have
time today to update our web pages. I was able to create some
writing prompts for the kids, which I plan on having them work on
this month and also in June. This week I will be working with
the students to create poems for Mother's Day. Once we edit
our rough drafts, we will type them and decorate them using Kids
Pix. By doing this, they will have a nice, personalized gift
for their mothers!
May 4, 2004:
This morning I took my class into Janine's classroom. She
talked to all the students about online journal writing and the
Star-W chat room. The kids seemed very excited about the whole
thing (especially the part when they create their own "secret
name")! After everything was explained, we paired up
each of my students with her students. We used all of the
computers in both classrooms so all pairs got a computer to themselves.
Janine's students taught my students how to access the online journal.
They did this by logging in themselves, then sending Janine a journal
message. After they did that, Janine's students showed my
students how to access the Star-W chat room. That was a big
hit! The kids were in there chatting away (well, some were
just acting goofy, but once we said something to them, they straightened
up). It was so cute because they were sitting right next to
each other and commuting through the computers! During lunch
I finished my "Cinco de Mayo" scavenger hunt. However,
I made a boo-boo! I accidentally edited my template for writing
prompts instead of "creating a new page from a copy of the
template page." Hopefully Art will be able to help me
out and create a new template page for me!
May 7, 2004:
In the past few days, my class has been eating, sleeping, and breathing
computers and technology! On Wednesday, May 5th, the kids
worked on a Cinco de May scavenger hunt that I created. Then
they visited a fun Mexico web site that I found for them, which
contained the history of Mexico, games, etc. They had a blast!
After school on Wednesday, I posted some messages in the students
online journals. I tried to ask all the students different
questions so it is more personal. Thursday, May 6th, the children
wrote Mother's Day poems, then typed them and added cute pictures
to them and printed them out using KidPix. They were so proud
of their work! Thursday evening, I remembered to tell Kristin
how proud I was of her to see that she did another journal entry!
Today I will show her how to work with the online journal for the
children to use since I am having a blast with in (and I just started
it the other day)! Today in the classroom, we will finish
up the Poems and we will also do some online journal writing.
May
8, 2004: Today, Saturday, we met again for some training.
Art got us started with our online rubrics. He showed us how
create and edit them...all online! It was so amazing to see
how quick and easy it was (because I thought it was going to be
complicated). I created a rubric for my picture prompts.
So, on the main picture prompt page, I have a link for the students
to go to so they can see how I am assessing them.
May 11, 2004:
All I have to say about the past few days is WOW! My kids
are LOVING the online journal writing. They are so eager every
morning to log on and reply to my messages. It seems like
once I get them on there, they don't want to get off! All
I have been hearing is "Miss Inferrera! I just sent you
a message! Read it so you can send me another message!"
I cannot keep up with them anymore! ;o) This afternoon
we are having a math test. Afterwards, I am going to have
them get back onto the computers to play some multiplication games
online. Also, the past few days I have been creating webquests gallore!
In the last two days, I put up 7 webquests! I am just on this
energy kick for Holiday Webquests, that's all! Feel free to
browse through them and let me know what you think!
May
13, 2004: This afternoon was unbelievable! After lunch, I
gave the students some "cool down" time. We usually
sit with our heads down as I read aloud a chapter from a chapter
book to them. Lately, however, I have been having them go
on the computers to write me a journal entry. Then later in
the day, or that evening at home, I respond to all of them.
That way the next day they can read my response and post me another
reply. As students were finishing up their journal responses,
they were asking me if they could go into the Star-W Chatroom.
My first response was "no" because along with our textbook
activities for multiplication, I also planned a fun game to play
that afternoon with multiplication facts. However, it only
took me about 5 minutes to change my mind because I thought of something
else to do! When everyone was done their journal entries,
I told them all to go into the Star-W Chatroom and create a "team
name" with their computer buddy. As they were doing that,
I was logging into the chatroom myself at my desktop computer.
Within minutes we were all set and ready to go. I could almost
see the wheels turning in their minds, trying to figure out what
I had up my sleeve this time! We had a "Math Rumble."
The name stuck right after I typed a message to all of the students
in the chatroom that stated, Let's get ready to Math Rumble!!!!!!"
I posted a multiplication problem in the chatroom. Then
the teams had to quickly solve the problem and type their answer
in the chatroom. The quicker they were with their correct
answers, the more points they would receive. For example,
the first correct team would receive 6 points, while the last correct
team received 1 point. I didn't tell them the correct answer
until they all posted their own answers (this was to prevent them
from changing their answers after seeing who got it right).
They were SO into it! This lasted all afternoon because they
were doing such a great job with it, they were learning to have
fun with math, AND they were learning more and more about team work
that I just didn't have it in me end it until it was close to dismissal.
I am definately going to do this more often!
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