Wednesday, September 30, 2009

September Post

I have dedicated a lot of my time working with my smartboard and creating lessons that allow me to make good use of it. The days of the chalkboard are long gone for me. Although it takes more prep work I have found that my time in the classroom is being used more efficiently. There is less time wasted transitioning between activities and more time getting work done. Also I know it may sound crazy but I think that just by using the technology it helps my students stay focused and interested in the material that we are covering.

One other point I would like to make is how grateful I am that I took the time to set up a classroom website. We spent time going through it's features at the beginning of the year and I think that this helped my students get into the routine of checking it and using it on a regular basis. In fact, if I don't update quick enough there will always be a student that tells me (and it is usually a different student everytime which lets me know that they are all using it). My next step is to try and set up a class blog and attach it to my website. I will be sure to let you all know when that happens so that you can check it out.

3 comments:

Dave Tarwater said...

Tom,

What a great start for the school year! Would you please post the link to your class web site, we would all like to take a look at what you are doing.

Kelly Berry said...

Starting with a website is great Tom! I keep my classroom website as our home page on both Firefox and Internet Explorer. I then link everything to that. Student know how to watch videos for IB units, navigate to their blog or just go to games.

http://schoolweb.acsd14.k12.co.us/kjschwic/

PS - if anyone has any great elementary website game sites, I would love to see them. Feel free to use this site for your purposes as well and let me know how to improve it!

Tom Ciolek said...

The address to my classroom website is http://sites.google.com/site/cioleksclassroom