My Third Post

I am finding the creation of this blog to be intriguing as I think about ways to make it useful, interesting and academically challenging. I can't believe all of the variables involved with blog building!  I spent some time exploring the various gadgets and believe there are many more that I will find that will be useful and fun to use.

My thirty fourth grade students are working very hard at becoming good writers. We have been struggling to put together cohesive paragraphs that use topic sentences, lots of details and then wrapping up our big thought with a concluding sentence that reminds the reader what we were discussing in the first place.  By the end of the school year, fourth graders need to be able to do this well.  Then we push them a little harder!

The next big writing exercise is using powerful words to help us get our point across in more interesting ways.  One way is through a descriptive writing assignment.  Before Spring Break, we started a creative writing piece in order to work on descriptive writing. The assignment is that the students have each discovered a new animal, which is actually a combination of two of their favorite animals.  They have to write an introductory paragraph that describes how they discovered the creature and then they move on to three paragraphs that describe the animal’s appearance, its diet and its habitat. The students then write a concluding paragraph to wrap up the adventure and describe what will happen in their lives from this moment on.

This exercise is a lot of fun for the students as they explore the English language and various ways of acquiring new words.  They can’t believe that Word has a Thesaurus built right in!  I think this blog could become a way to interact or conference with students with their writing in a new way for all of us. It might let us push the envelope a little farther with our technology and how we can put ourselves and our writing into a more interesting light.

Welcome to my Classroom Blog!

I am excited to use technology in different ways to stimulate and inspire as many students as possible across the curriculum. With the ever-changing landscape of education these days, I want to give as many options to students as I can in order to find ways to encourage their learning and help them to see that they can learn and the sky is the limit. When students are presented with different ways of looking at or thinking about ideas and concepts, it can help them understand how their own brain works and maybe help them discover how they can approach different or difficult problems.

One way I wish to use this blog is to explore what different teachers are doing with blogs in their classrooms. I have ideas for how I wish to use it, but am looking forward to seeing what others do and what successes or "failures" they may have had. I use the word failure loosely as I agree with Thomas Edison when he was asked how he felt when he had hundreds of filaments fail on his way to inventing the lightbulb, and he replied, "they weren't failures, we were successful in finding out what doesn't work." (not his exact words, but this was his thinking). I am excited about finding different teacher blogs from the USA and around the world to gather ideas and to expand my own thinking about using this technology to help the learners in my classroom.

My second goal with this blog is to use it with students in various ways to help them think and write. I currently teach fourth grade and I have a lot of great technology in my classroom from a Smartboard and document camera to clickers and Flip cameras which students have full use of. We spend a good portion of our day using this technology but I am ready to take things much further with a daily interactive piece, like a blog, where students will be required to read and respond, or create their own interactive idea for other students to respond to. I am looking forward to exploring the different ways this technology can be used to help students learn and love to learn.