School Email

Students in grades 4 and 5 will be beginning to use their school email accounts over the next few weeks. These accounts are through k12usa. You can visit this site at www.k12usa.com to see how it works. The students should know their login information and password, but if they forget, they can either click the forgot password link, or contact their homeroom teacher or one of the technology team members.

These students will be using their email account in a safe and secure environment as they begin to learn how to email their classmates and read emails from their classmates. We will learn how to insert attachments after they are more comfortable with the setup.

Maine Community Heritage Project - New Portland

The town of New Portland is participating in the Maine Community Heritage Project this year. This project will allow the town of New Portland to add many of their artifacts to the website www.mainememory.net.

We are just in the beginning phases at this point, but by June of 2009, we will have between 100 and 200 artifacts and at least 5 exhibits on the Maine Memory site. Please visit often and keep up with all of the additions that will be taking place quickly.

Here is some information from the Maine Memory Site about this project:

New Portland: The New Portland team—a partnership between the New Portland Community Library, New Portland Historical Society, and MSAD #74—has created a new partnership to document and share the town's history for the upcoming bicentennial and the 20th anniversary of their library. New Portland is a small town on the Carrabassett River in western Somerset County

Maine Historical Society, in partnership with the Maine State Library, is excited to announce that the first eight Maine communities have been selected to participate in the Maine Community Heritage Project (MCHP). The communities are: Bath, Farmington, Hampden, Islesboro, Lubec, New Portland, Presque Isle, and Thomaston.

The Maine Community Heritage Project is an innovative new program that promotes collaboration between local schools, historical societies, and public libraries through the exploration and celebration of local history. It grows out of the Maine Memory Network (www.mainememory.net), the Maine Historical Society’s nationally recognized statewide digital museum, and is supported by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum & Library Services.

The Maine Historical Society received fifty applications for the program. Applications were reviewed by a panel of librarians, educators, and historians and evaluated based on the team’s enthusiasm, commitment to local partnership, and ability to complete the project. Selection of communities also took into account the geographic, economic, and social diversity of the applicant pool and overall balance of the eight teams.

Eight additional communities will be selected next spring to participate in a second project cohort that will run from June 2009-June 2010. Application guidelines will be posted in early 2009.

Summer Technology Institute MSAD #74

Today is the 3rd day of week 2 in our technology institute. We have covered a lot of topics. It looks as though everyone has found at least one thing that they plan to continue using into the new school year. We have covered website creation, podcasting, using smartboards and wii remotes, setting up Moodle classrooms, creating an imovie, and the use of OpenOffice to create presentations, documents, drawings and spreadsheets.

Feel free to leave comments based on your experience with the summer technology institute!

Here is the district technology logo (good job creating this Tom)
:)

Type to Learn 3 Update!

Every year students in grades 2 through 5 work very hard on learning the home row with a program called Type to Learn 3. There are 25 levels in TTL3 and the goal is to be typing correctly by the end of grade 5. Grades 2 and 3 do not get through the whole program but do begin to practice and get through some of TTL3 during the year. So far this year, I have had 6 students that have successfully finished all 25 levels. All but one of these students are in grade 5. We are working toward an even longer list as many of the students are in the high teens to low 20s.

By learning the keyboard correctly, the students can type much faster because there is no need for them to look at the keyboard as they type. Keyboarding quickly is very important as the students begin to type longer papers in the higher grade levels. All 7th and 8th grade students have laptops through the MLTI (Maine Learning Technology Initiative) program that the state offers. By having the ability to keyboard correctly and quickly, students can get their work done much faster and more accurately.

The students also have lessons on sitting correctly and holding their arms and hands correctly as they type so there are no injuries.

The Great Mail Race

I plan to begin a project based learning activity with the 5th grade classrooms very soon. This activity is called the great mail race. Students need to develop a survey to send to another school in a different state. When this survey is complete, the students mail the survey to the selected schools and track which schools they contact and which schools respond.

We can develop a graph, a map, or both with this information. The surveys can be about the school in general or about the state. 5th grade works a lot with the 50 states, so my guess is that we will create a state survey with the cooperation of their homeroom teacher. I will update more as this project gets going.

Flat Stanley

This is not my Flat Stanley picture. I have yet to take many pictures, but this was a good example for this time of year!

I am in great hopes of particpating in Flat Stanley with all 3rd and 4th grade classrooms district wide this year. I just applied on the Flat Stanley Project website last night to be able to communicate with other Flat Stanley schools. If my memory is correct, there are around 10-12 schools in Maine participating and over 1700 schools world wide.

If you are not familiar with Flat Stanley, please visit www.flatstanley.com for the project details. I know that the CCS library has some Flat Stanley books, and possibly other district schools as well. I did just order a Flat Stanley collection to have on hand to share with students as I am introducing this project.

I am in hopes of completing type to learn very soon assuming that there are no snow days etc... and beginning this project in all 5 schools. Please let me know if there is anything that can be added for integration with this project.

Thanks,
Jaime

ACTEM Conference 2007

I started my day by going to the 20 Ways for Teachers to Use Google conference. This was full of information pertaining to Google. There are lots of free tools that I did not realize were included at the Google website. The website that highlights what this conference included is: Www.top20googles.wikispaces.com. The only disappointing part of this conference was that the Internet was down the whole time, so we had to have a lecture style demonstration. Sharon Betts did a wonderful job sharing even without the visuals.

The second session, I chose to attend the MEDMS update conference.
I learned a lot about the plans for MEDMS for next school year. MEDMS is the informational database used in Maine. MEDMS stands for Maine Education Data Management System. The new changes will be more formal most likely in November. I will share more then as nothing is quite final. Some of the changes will be very helpful.

My third session was Technology-Rich Project Based Learning. This session was presented by Jim Moulton. His website is www.jimmoulton.org, and his project based learning portaportal guest name is techpbl. I was very excited by all of the different ideas that Jim shared. There are a lot of project based learning ideas that can be included in many different subjects and can make great use of technology. I have already signed up for the Flat Stanley project and plan to use this with 3rd and 4th grade classes this year.

The fourth session that I attended was Web 2.0 for Elementary Teachers. This shared a site that shows great examples of blogs and wikis. As this was the keynote address by Will Richardson, this session was a great eye opener to what can be done with this type of tool. The wiki for this information is: http://web4elementary.wikispaces.com/.

One other note of interest that I have heard a lot about was the K12 Online Conference. This is a free resource. Check it out when you have a second! The site is just www.k12onlineconference.com.

Thanks,
Jaime