The first day of school is almost here, only a few more days and hours. My room is as ready as it ever will be. I have changed my first day plans 3 times in the last week and I think I have settled on a plan that will grab the kids attention. I have gone over bus numbers and have wrist bands for all the bus riders so that they can get on the right bus in the afternoon. I know that on Monday I'll probably be up at 4am and ready to go by 5. So I guess I'll beat the traffic and get a good parking place. I'm guessing that the parents will be arriving with their kids by 7 or 7:15. At open house it looked like they had a long summer and were ready for school to start(parents and kids).

Oh also our school is going under a major renovation, so we will also have "Bob the Builder" to contend with.
It should be a great year and I can't wait for it to start!

I had a very interesting time today while presenting a workshop on incorporating technology in the elementary art and music classroom. Everyone was very interested and asked some great questions. I can't wait to see how others take the ideas and make them their own. Here is a link to the outline of the workshop.

Social networking in schools

From a report by the National School Boards Association the internet isn't as dangerous as people think, and teachers should let students use social networks at school.

From this article it appears that the dangers of the internet are created more by the media and political fear mongers that reality.

Sorta like a Podcast

Podcasting

Ok,
I've taken the district workshop on podcasting and it is very cool and easier to do that I thought it would be. Bradley Smrstick the area 6 Tech trainer did a great job presenting the workshop.
Like with most things on a computer we learned many ways to create the audio files used to make podcasts.
I think that by using a small hand held digital recorder it will be very easy to create podcasts with the kids in my classroom. I am going to share this with the faculty at Mary Bryant.
So far the only problem I've had is that the podcast files quickly fill my allotted server space on the IDEAS server.

Books I'm reading

Only a few more days till we are back at school. I've been reading a few books for inspiration for my class. The first is a book by Anastiasia Goocstein "Totally Wired, What teens and tweens are really doing online" This is a good book to help get inside the heads of our students and how the relate and interact with the technology around them. One interesting anecdote was the story told about the web site MySpace. Frances Harris a librarian at University Laboratoy High School in Urbana, Illinois recounts how a student wrote a paper on the poet Mary Wollstonecraft and then created a profile for her on MySpace. Soon "Mary" had friends like T. S. Eliot. Students were responding and making comments to "Mary" with blogs of poetry.
This book gives examples of how students are using technology in many interesting, unique, and collaborative ways. I enjoined the read and feel challenged to incorporate some of the ideas in my classroom this year.
I am also reading the book "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other powerful web tools" by Will Richardson. In this book I came across this question Will posed in the first few pages "What needs to change about our curriculum when our students have the ability to reach audiences far beyond our classroom walls? What changes must we make in our teaching as it becomes easier to bring primary sources to our students?
Both of these books are making me rethink my curriculum and the way information will be presented in my classroom. I'm hoping that I can include some or even one of the ideas presented in these books and the blogs I have been reading. But being an immigrant to this digital world and not a native growing up with computers in the home and music on Ipods. I still
have to "translate" to the concept of a classroom that is not bound by the walls of the classroom or a specific period..... time and space.