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.