Third Grade Students at Herrera Elementary School Try Learning.com

Don Hudson's third grade students learn how to do their lessons in Learning.com.

Emerson Elementary Children Begin Their Computer Lessons

Second grade students at Emerson have their first computer lesson. The children learned how to get the laptops out of the cart and how to log in and open Internet Explorer. At the end of the lesson, they learn how to shut down and put the computers back into the cart.

Next they will learn how to log in to Learning.com so that they can begin to learn keyboarding skills.

Let's Explore Easy Tech

Today we begin our professional development for the Easy Tech online program from http://www.learning.com/. This is a technology program that extends into the core curriculum. Today teachers from PESD schools are getting their first look at the program and they will get started creating lesson plans for their classrooms. This is a technology program that extends into the core curriculum.

Professional trainers from Oregon are enduring the Phoenix heat to help us for the next two days. Then teachers will begin to implement the lessons in classrooms around the district. The district has 2500 licenses for use by district teachers. About 1500 are currently assigned. If you are interested in using this tool in your classroom, contact a member of the Instructional Technology Team.

Check Out Some PESD Technology Projects

It's the second week of school and already PESD teachers and students are doing great technology activities. Here are some samples:

Emerson Third Grade: http://www.mrquicksclass.blogspot.com/
Whittier Sixth Grade: http://www.schoolrack.com/mrsramirez/
Whittier Sixth Grade: http://www.gcast.com/u/MrsRamirez/main
Bethune Video Announcements: http://bethunenews.blogspot.com/
Dunbar Sixth Grade: http://msshores.blogspot.com/

If you're ready to try a project, call the Instructional Technology Staff for help.

Help Learning The Cool Software on Your Computer

My colleague John Kain passed along a good place for learning about Picasa, Photostory, Movie Maker, and Audacity all in one place at this URL: http://ilife4windows.wikispaces.com/. Check it out!

SMART Board Issues Resolved

Three days into the school year we have discovered an issue with the SMART Board Software installation on the new computer image that has just been deployed by the PESD MIS Department. If you are trying to use the pen feature with any software other than SMART Notebook, you may have noticed that it doesn't work. We have asked the MIS Dept. to send out a fix. Since we don't know how long that will take, here is a short term solution:

Click on Start>All Programs>SMART Board Software>SMART Board Tools. This puts the SMART Board Tools icon in the taskbar and the SMART Board works correctly. However, you have to repeat this process every time you log in.

Cool Web Sites

Now that everyone is back to school and many of our students have access to laptop computers and wireless internet, I thought our PESD teachers might like to have a list of internet possibilities. That is my focus for today.

Let's start with some web sites for our younger students. Two of my favorites are Funbrain and Starfall. Funbrain, http://www.funbrain.com/, has a searchable database of educational games as well as other activities for K - 8 children. StarFall (http://www.starfall.com/) is a reading site. Primarily designed for first grade, Starfall.com is also useful for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and second grade.

Math Web Resources: The PESD web site has a great math resources web page at this URL: http://www.phxelem.k12.az.us/technology_and_learning/on-line_learning/Math/math_resources.htm

Science Resources: Here are some science resources that I recently discovered.

• http://www.americanchemistry.com/s_plastics/hop_jr/activities/index.html
• http://www.internet4classrooms.com/science_elem.htm
• http://www.teacher-access.com/elementaryscience.htm
• http://www.bcps.org/offices/lis/curric/elem/Escience.html
• http://www.science-lessons.ca/games/index.html
• http://www.chemistry.org/portal/a/c/s/1/general.html?DOC=education\wande\index.html
• http://eo.ucar.edu/educators/links_elem.html
• http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/teachers_resources/lesson_plans.html

As I find other resources, I'll list them here so check back often.

Professional Development Follow-up

Wow, thanks to the 3rd and 5th grade teachers for their great questions yesterday at our professional development session--and thanks also to Helen Rentz for sharing her classroom activities with the group.



Here are the URLs for the technology integration resources that we talked about during our session:

Typing Pals Keyboarding Software, http://school.typingpal.com/index_ecole.asp

Easy Tech: http://www.learning.com/

SMART Notebook: http://www.smarttech.com/

I look forward to other opportunities to work with you all. If you are looking for other on-line resources, check out the list in the "Helpful Links" area on the right side of the screen.