new allotments on Abbynet

Am I the only one who is worried about the allotment changes on abbynet?

As a person who has spent the last couple of years following the district initiatives and the support for intergrating technology into teaching, I was saddened with the new down grading of Abbynet space for teachers our district. After feeling encouraged through the last two years in the technology learning community to create technologies for classroom use (for example, many of us have webpages on Abbynet), we are now being told that the maximum space we get on abbynet is 200M (double of the average teacher). My abbynet account with my webpage is 2.8GB of our current 3GB capacity. The current allotment does not take into consideration the importance of the item,s like websites, in maintaining contact with parents and enabling students to have a connection to the classroom outside of confines of the school buidling.

I guess I am concerned for the future of my project, and others like it, if it can't be moved in the next 10 days. I can't go for even a day without my school email, or I will have parents angry about not being able to reach me, so leaving it isn't an option. A colleague and I were talking about this, this morning. On his account, with no website and a recent cleanse of what he considered on essential emails he had 192M of info. To maintain my email I would have to get rid of my entire webpage in under 10 days, since the earliest I can go to get help is Tuesday.

February 18

I spent most of the Pro-d day on Friday trying to finish my project, but it didn't quite happen. I tried to export my survey data into Excel but I found it was way too hard to figure out how to make simple charts in Excel that basically looked like the ones in the survey. Soo, I am going to rethink my presentation/analysis of the data I collected and figure out a different way to interpret/present it. I have had some success in getting a few more colleagues to do some online activities but equipment appears to be a major stumbling block. However, I'll keep trying.

Website for Classroom use

I've been negligent on my blogs of late, but I have been busy with T-LITE, including classroom website work. My web page is hardly flashy, but I have begun to work on a Literature 12 page. Last semester, all I did for my classes was take pictures in class and place them on my website. I made slideshows, too, and shared these with the kids, but I did not put the slideshow on the website. This is probably easy to do?
As I mentioned, I am working on Literature 12 resources, and I made diagrams for all 46 poems and placed these in a side bar called Diagrams. I split the diagrams into the four units.
Also, I've begun making review quizzes for each of the 46 poems, but so far I'm only finished unit 1.
I have to work with a million other things on the website, but now that semester one (with no spare) is over, I can begin to focus more on my website again....

Blog entry 2- update of project

I have been quite busy, and with the start of semester 2 and finally a spare, I have finally had time to spend doing more updates on my webpage project. Currently, I have been working on adding on a Social Studies section to my mainly English dominated webpage. I have created pieces, but have not activated them quite yet (I need to get the bugs out beofreI let parents and kids view them).

I have started to develop a secondary focus, as I am working on moving my webpage off of first class to a seperate domain. I recently found out that I will be moving to a city next year, and want to have my website usable for the new location. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a free website building domain as easy to use as first class, which I finally feel very proficient in. I forgot how frustrating the intial learning curve is.

The second semester students are really enjoyiong the current page and are frequenting the homework blog. I am working on setting up a second Blog for my honors English class, who love to feed off of each other. We have some fabulous creative writers in there, so I was thinking of having them do blog entries to share their creative writing, or even have a running blog story where everyone can contribute. I am keeping my eyes peeled for PRo-D related to this to see how others have used it.

My next step is to start adding in Audio to the webpages, but I would like to see about getting a new page established first, so that I don't do a whole load of work to have to leave it in June a mere 5 months away. If anyone uses webpage builders otuside of first class and have any recommendations for a user friendly free web builder please let me know. I will blog agai after Spring Break!
Kristi

Second Blog -- Nanos to play educational music

It's been awhile since I blogged, but I have been exploring my original question, which was: "Can iPods be used effectively to play educational music in the classroom?"

I use a lot of songs to teach math in my grade three classroom, and managing CDs can be tricky (changing the CD between songs, etc.). I wanted to find out if using an iPod would be easier. Having seen a Kim Sutton math workshop this summer where she used an iPod to arrange her songs into categories, and could access them quickly and easily, I was excited to give it a try. I bought my own iPod, and an iTrip to broadcast songs through my existing CD player/radio.

What I have discovered so far is that the iTrip has its limitations. I'm in a country school where even cell phone signals are not the greatest, and I've found that it affects my iTrip's "broadcastability." The songs are useable, but staticy. I would now like to try using a set of portable speakers, which could be set up at the front of the classroom on my teaching table, and see if the sound quality is better. The kids need to be able to hear the songs clearly and loudly enough to be able to participate fully (obviously). I must say that so far, I haven't been as happy with the results as I thought I'd be, and the thought of spending my own money to buy portable speakers doesn't thrill me. It would only take one "oops," and they'd be toast.

So that's where I'm at.....moving along slowly towards an answer as to whether this is feasible in the classroom or not....still wanting it to work, but limited by a couple of factors and not sure where to go with it next.....Has anyone seen cheap, used portable speakers anywhere?

Suzanne Gravel
Grade 3 Teacher,
South Poplar Traditional

My question

I know I am late but better late than never.
I want my students to be able to practice their spelling words on their own as parents often don't know how pronounce words. I would like for my students to listen to and read poems on the web and memorize them on their own. Eventually I would like the students to record their reading and song on the web.
I would like parents to be able to refer to the web to check the notices, what their child is suppose to read at home, the schedule for parent helpers and different websites offered to them in French.
So my question is:
How does my website can:

• help the students who use it have better results in their spelling tests
• help students to learn poems on their own
• get students more interested in their learning
  
• help parents to be better informed about what is going on in the classroom
• help parents to share in the special events through pictures
• help parents to use different French site

Voilà