Gotta go quick!

I don't know if I can do this without running out of juice on my computer. I do want to say that I moved my document camera from in front of my desk to on my desk. Boy that has made a difference!! I use it all the time. I did use it before, but wow. I have used the camera more in the last week than I have the previous two months.

On a different note, I am starting to construct how I want to put together my research project. I am trying to give students a lot of practice in constructing the pieces for the project. Now I have to find a focus, area of the world, that I want them to research ecosystems. I have talked to my Humanities teacher to see where in the world she is right now and for how long she will be there. I came to find out that she is in Asia, okay rather large!, I just need to see if it has all of the ecosystems I want. She, the Humanities teacher, will be working on Asia for about a month or so. This may work out well!

And by the way, I did run out of juice before I could finish. Luckily when I plugged it in I came right back where I was:)

Milli Meeting

We went over copyright and fair use with items used from the internet. This was interesting because we, Suzanne and I, just received pictures from a parent of one of our GEMS parents. He is an artist and we got his permission to use his pictures.

Getting Back into the swing of things

Getting back after two weeks off is sometimes a little tough. Boy I forgot how tired I can get and the amount of things to do in a day. And now my laundry is piling up!

I just need to make a list of things to do. Maybe this will be my New Years Resolution:) I will put that on my list of things to do!

Using Pictures for class

Last week and the week before I was using many pictures that I got off the Internet. When I found the picture I just copied and then placed it into my presentation. Later I was thinking that I should have wrote some type of reference for each of them. I should do this for two reasons; 1. I should reference any material that I use and 2. it is good to model for my students.

My students just turned in a project in which they had to display the structures and functions of different organs from the plant. A couple of students decided to do a power point presentation and used pictures from the Internet. I forgot to ask them to provide their references and did ask them to go back and do so. I still got www.google.com as a reference!! My oh my, I need to do some work on this.

Passing it on

This week my teammate is starting research papers with our 8th graders. She has scheduled time to work with the students in the computer lab. I told her about using data bases in addition to search engines. We went to the MPS website and went through the student resource options. She thought this was fabulous. I can't wait to see the results!

Technology

Okay, so I haven't blogged for awhile, but I have had just a ton going on personally. I will have to say I am having fun on Facebook. I have been able to reconnect with some people I haven't seen forever. I have also been interacting with images from google and using them to reinforce my curriculum with my Promethium board. My students will be doing a project soon, not research, and I am trying to figure out how to give them a tech option for it. They will be displaying the structure and function of a plant.

Facebook Fun

I joined Facebook about 2 weeks ago. I am having a great time finding people and reconnecting. My high school class has a page and we are updating each other quite a bit. I also use it for networking. I like that it can be almost like text messaging, but on-line.