The Gate has Opened and We Can't Go Back

School has started and we are all tired. The kids are tired, I am tired. The first few weeks are rough. Rules, procedures, activities to get to know the kids, team building, not to mention a full day of teaching after a month of no school. Whew. In a couple weeks it will be all over, done in a whirlwind, not literally, but it will feel like a few weeks.

Before school started, i sat down to upgrade all the computers in my room for the start of the year. I laid them all out on the desks and went one by one updating windows, running the disk clean, defragging the drive, and in the middle of it all, I thought, what am I doing this for? I have a class full of computer users coming to me. I can show them how to update, clean, defrag, and manage their computers. This way, they can head home and manage their computer that has never been updated, cleaned, or defragged. It will be a monthly oil change for the computers. How nice it will be.

We dived right into the new reading program with gusto and, like any new program, we had a few glitches, but we will work them out and get after it. It will be another great year with new group of students that are full of ideas and wanting new experiences to help them learn. Let's Go!

Walking a Tightrope Without a Net..book!

I have been doing a lot of reading this summer about using our students netbooks better. I have found a few programs that I want to use. As I was reading Dave Warlick's blog he mentioned using Xmind as a brainstorming program. I was using Freemind but Xmind is so much easier to use. So I will be installing it on the student computers when we start school.

I was searching around on the net and ran into a blog by Brad Flickenger. He talks a lot about using netbooks in the classroom. He has some great ideas about using them in the curriculum, classroom management, and basic netbook stuff in the classroom. It gave me some ideas about having the students sign a netbook contract. We will put together a few rules and consequences for the netbooks. He also mentions that he has the students do a monthly maintenance checklist to keep them clean and orderly. I will be putting one of those together also to keep them running as well as giving the students a sense of ownership for their computer.

One thing Brad talked about was using flash drives in the classrooms. If the students have their own computers, why use a flash drive? I can see a few reasons why we should use flash drives. Taking documents home for use on their computers and going from one computer in the school to the computer lab to complete a reports or to show a presentation. I have not been sold on the Google Docs yet for Elementary School students. I want to use it, but I have parents that do not want (or do not have a computer) email addresses for their children. I want a way for the students to get a Google Docs account, but I am still trying to figure out how to get all the students an account. I was hoping that Google would let me put a class of students into a group so I can manage them. I am hoping that we will get to the point of having parents set up the account for the students. We will see this coming year.

I really like his idea about sending the students a question each morning before school for them to answer in the morning. We have the students do Morning Work (a language question, geography question, analogy question and a math question) and work as partners to complete the questions. Adding a message on our Wiki would be a great addition to the morning work. It could be a starter for Social Studies, a topic in math, language, or even a situation in class. So many ideas. I can't wait.