Snow, snow, snow

My Backyard...Whoever said Spring was coming soon...lied. :-)

And no I'm not just repeating my last name over and over. Oklahoma experienced a blizzard on Tuesday, Feb.1, 2011. We got a record 17 inches and 6 more today.  They are predicting more on Sunday and Tuesday.  Ugh! We've been out of school since the storm hit. So I've been using technology to talk and discuss with my students.

At the beginning of the year I setup online blogs for my students through weebly.  This allowed for them to have a place to write at home and not worry about their notebooks. Then they print their writing and put it in their notebooks at school.  If you would like more info on this click here.

I've been emailing parents and having them respond on their blogs and on the classroom blog. Here are a few ideas that we've been working on this week as we sit and wait for the snow to stop.

• OCCT test prep
• summarzing in 10 words or less
• monitoring our thinking
• turning in reading minutes online (Might make this permanent for next year)
• framing our essays
• how to write to a prompt (our test is 20 days away)
• slice of life

 If road conditions and the weather doesn't improve soon, I'm thinking of videotaping some lessons and the posting them on the blog.  But I've never done that. However, I can always just google it and figure it out.

I Have Classroom Bloggers

Today my students launched their on-line blogs. I could not have done it without the help of Mrs. G! My students are very excited about their new blogs. I am sure we have hiccups to work through, but I am so proud of them for being patient and listening attentively.  The exciting thing for me is that some of my students who weren't so pumped about at home writing are now very pumped!  I highly recommend Weebly's services!!!

Native Techno Users

One of the great things about the world today is there are over four different generations in the work place and we are teaching students who are born into the techno world. We on the other had are immigrants into this world.  I wish I could say I was super techno savvy. Yes, I have a SMARTboard and yes I try to not make it a glorified white board, but this year I really wanted to take the step next with student involvement.  With the help of my fabulous media specialist Mrs. G, I am off to a great start. We are using Weebly for education as our host.  I have set up my students' accounts and my account. The goal of this class site is for my students to write at home using the blog feature. It is set up to be a private blog and only users with the password can enter the site.  It isvery easy to set up and I'm very pleased to say that on Monday my students are going to jump in and begin creating their sites and hopefully we will have blogs going by Friday. 

My overall purpose for the blogs is to engage my students in Writing Outside of the School Day (calling it W.O.O.T.S).  Writers don't just write at school. They write at all times of the day.  My expectation will be for them to write 3 days a week.  So here's hoping the techno-savvy 5th graders will buy in and write, write, write!