Globe Trotting!

The Global Schoolhouse is a website that I would find useful in my classroom. This website was created by former teachers in an effort to increase communication on a global bases. The website offers activities for elementary through high school age students. It contains political information, virtual field trips, and science connections. In our curriculum students are asked to make text to world connections in their readings. This website is an excellent model for students in making that connection. However, my favorite area was the area of special needs students performing. This would be a good source for confidence building with my students. The website also offers a section where software can be purchased by teachers, administrators, etc. Overall, this website would allow my students to discover different and exciting new places, obtain background knowledge, make world connections and even play games to improve thier knowledge.

Run, kid, run!

Run, kid, run!
Originally uploaded by Gianni D.

It's raining

Do you know what that means?

The website I added to my delicious account was a vocabulary website. I liked this site because it offered different lesson plans that could be used to develop vocabulary skills for students. The site covered grade levels K- 12th grade. The skills included spelling, predicting, retelling which would be very useful in the primary grades. Some of the sites even had memory games for student to play.Some of the websites were interactive, internet connected, cooperative group oriented etc. The links were also rated from one star to five stars. This site would be beneficial in the classroom setting so that instruction could be diffentiated for students. The activities ranged from very easy to challenging which would help motivate slower paced students because they would be successful and motivate higher achievers to improve their skills.

Teaching each other

The EFL classroom 2.0 was an excellent blog site. Their motto "when one teaches, two learn" describes this site perfectly. The site is divided into two sections, the main page and the site map. The main page provide several options for teachers. These include a chat room, a forum which contains lesson plans, teacher question and answers, blog posts etc. All of this information would be extremely useful when working with ESOL students. The teachers respond from all parts of the country. The teachers teach grades K-12. The site map serves as a network of information and where to obtain information. The information includes video sites, listening sites, speaking sites and everything in between! I really loved this site and I think it would be useful for all that work with ESL students

Have you loved on someone today?

I chose to read a from the Mysterious Teaching Blog. Underneath this blog was a blog about how parents show or think they show their children that they love them. The author indicated that today's students often rely on teachers to get hugs because parents feel that theyshow love by buying things, believing them over teachers or other adults. By the same token they send their children to school without breakfast, without proper clothing and sick. The writer felt that parents in some cases didn't care. I disagree with her in that respect because some parents are trying so hard to put food on the table, clothes on their back and make them feel like they are like all of the other kids in the neighborhood. However, regardless of why children are asking for a hug, we all feel the need to be loved and needed. So,in the correct circumstance, it's okay to provide a hug to students.

Peachy Keen Websites

The three articles that I viewed were ,were discussed e-learning,
writing and collaborative learning . The collaborative learning site discussed the seven steps for social networking. The site included information that would be helpful before launching into this endeavor, helpful information to use when searching for other networks and ways to evaluate work completed on this site. I felt the most important information provided was the need to be careful with what students are writing and the age in which students should begin to use this site. the e-learning site discussed sites that provide professional development and resources that can be used with ELL,ESL and EFL students. Since the blogs are updated several times a day the information is current and useful. The third site was discussed ways for creating text to speech animated movies. this site enables students to use words in context, create diaglogue and create writing in a variety of genres. All of these sites could work together to create a writing atmosphere that would enable all students to be successful as well as develop BICS and CALP.

What a Way to Go!

The article "The Best Places Where Students Can Write On-Line" discussed different places students could go in order to write. The first area discussed was Edublogs where students could go and write their own blogs. Another place that students could go to write was Micro-Blogs. In micro-blogs students could write short posts and could add multimedia items. E-cards is another site that was referred to . In these sites, students were able to use the images provided and create writing related to the images. Bookr was a site he specifically said was useful to ESL students. This site allowed children to Flickr an image,drag the image to a book and then write about the image. My favorite site referred to in this article was Writing Online Books. In these sites the student were provided with story frames if needed, prompts if needed and students could invite others to help write the book. This is a valuable collaborative teaching tool. It would encourage students to write and help them if necessary. In any event, the student would be able to successfully write!