Blessed to Teach and Read

Whew! First 7 days of school down, 180 more to go! While looking in Karen Bolotin's LiveBinder , (Online News and Magazines for Kids and a fabulous resource that in some way should be linked to your teacher webpage to get students reading high-interest, non-fiction articles online), I linked to Karen's Pinterest page , which has LOADS of picture ideas for the classroom! (Was that the longest sentence ever? Possibly. I hope it was intelligible.) Pinterest, if you haven't discovered it yet, is a place where you "pin" your virtual, visual "interests". While you need an invite to join, you can request one from their website by submitting your e-mail address. It's a place to collect quotes, recipes, ideas for home redecorating, ideas for school, etc. and to credit the source that created it. While looking through Karen's Pinterest page, I went another layer deeper onto Mrs. Morris' Simply 2nd Resources blog to a very simple way to sho...

How awesome is this ?!? The picture resources from The Library of Congress are phenomenal and an untapped resource! How cool will it be to show my students actual photographs of Native Americans and have them make deductions and inferences before they start researching?!? SO glad I saw this link before Monday. LOVE this! And I thought using JogtheWeb was going to be cool. Old school awesomeness!

I'm back from our first leadership meeting for the 2011-2012 school year and what should be in my Twitter feed, but a stunning list of ideas for using different technology tools in my teaching. I plan to officially start BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) this year with my class with guidance from our Instructional Technology Specialist, Susan Brandon. Students bring the technology they already own at home for use during class. Those who can't bring something can borrow a school laptop so that less laptops are needed per class, thus freeing up a greater number of laptops for other classes. Skimming through some of the ideas makes me feel like I need to get an iPad...