Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all of my Lesley Cohort Buddies. I know everyone is happy to be finished with school this week and looking forward to the next couple of weeks off. I hope you're finishing up with your WebQuest so we can get started on our new assignments on the next course. Did you see that we have several assignments posted?

I hope everyone has a blessed holiday season. I'll see you in 2010!

The WebQuest is finished!!

I'm happy to say that my WebQuest is finished. I've sent my URL to a cohort friend to help me look for typos. After that, I'll go ahead and post it on the Discussion Board so that I'll be able to relax a bit before our next course starts.

School has been very busy as we get closer to the holidays and Winter Break. Our Kindergarten children are very excited of course for a visit from Santa. We will be "traveling around the world" this week helping them to experience customs and traditions of other countries. I will be teaching about France and I made a PowerPoint of many sights and scenes from France. With our Promethean boards, it will be a great way to share photos for all to see.

On a personal note, my son has arrived home from college for the holidays, so I'm happy to have him home with the family. We will spend Christmas here and then will leave on the 26th for Florida. We will visit one grandparent in Orlando and the other in Sarasota. We'll be back to celebrate the New Year with friends and neighbors here.

Almost finished with my WebQuest

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. It was so nice to have the week off. I got sick on Thanksgiving day, so for the past week I've concentrated on getting better. Back to work now. I'm almost finished with my WebQuest. I'm using the Quest Garden site and it has been easy to work on each section. The navigation bar is already set up and the site gives a lot of hints, suggestions, and many samples to look at. I'm a little frustrated with the links I've selected. A few that were working well when we turned in our draft, are not available. I'm having to spend some time looking for appropriate sites that fit the task and process of my quest. I hope to complete it in the next few days and go ahead and post my URL. It will feel great to have finished.

It's great to have a break...

It's great to have a break from school and to be almost finished with our 2nd course. Thanks to everyone for helping me to celebrate my birthday on Sunday in class. THANKS Janie, for the yummy cupcakes.

I'm making progress on my webquest. I've decided to use QuestGarden. It has many designs available to use and provides many helps and suggestions. After the 30 day free trial, the subscription is only $20 for two years. That's not bad. I sure would like to get mine completed early. School gets more and more hectic the closer it gets to the holidays. It would be nice to have it behind me. I'm anxious to be able to view everyone else's too. Good luck with your work. Thanks for all of the help everyone has provided to each other. We'll make it together. Happy Thanksgiving.

Hooray! Thanksgiving break is here. I'm spending this weekend in class to complete work on my website. Janie and I presented Chapter 3 to the class this morning in a brief presentation on Weblogs. We created a blog called It's Turkey Time and posted a question for everyone to respond to: "It's just not Thanksgiving without..." We're learning how to post to our own blog as well as post comments to others. Each time I work on it, I find that my comfort level increases. We learned about Wikis this morning as well. These are completely new to me. I'm anxious to browse the Web to look for Kindgergarten Wikis to see how I might use them with my class. We have several more presentations this afternoon and then I'm hoping we'll talk about our WebQuest assignment.

Making Progress...

It's been a long week! School has been very busy getting my Kindergarten class ready for Thanksgiving. Along with the many standards we are working on daily, we are getting ready to host parents and grandparents for our annual Thanksgiving luncheon. We'll be putting on a short play complete with costumes, songs, and props. It always is a big hit, but I will be happy for our Thanksgiving week break.

This week also included a day out for Quarterly Training, my big annual Observation with the new extensive evaluation, work on Graduate School assignments, and two tours of Assisted Living Centers which I'm trying to consider for my Mom. Whew!!

I am starting to feel pretty good about my progress toward my WebQuest. It has taken me a good deal of time to narrow down my topic, decide on a good "quest" angle to take, and move ahead with the planning on it. I still have some more work to do this weekend before I can submit the draft. Working with Kindergarten students who are not reading yet, and not working on the Internet alone presents some challenges when writing the quest in terms that will be easily understood by the students, but include the proper information needed by teachers or other adults who will be guiding them. As I have searched for appropriate Kindergarten webquests to review, it has been fun to save some that I think I could use with my students.

Janie and I have spent some additional time this week at Dodgen working on our websites. I have learned some things on my own as I continue to explore Dreamweaver. I'm hoping that the work I've done is correct and that I will be able to create the links I need and attach the documents that I have planned for my site.

I hope everyone is doing well on their progress as well. I'll see you bright and early next Saturday.

Mid-Term Assignments....How's it going?

This has been a busy week. In addition to the many ongoing projects and activities of school each day, I have been trying to find time to make progress on my mid-term assignments for ECOM 6008. Janie and I spent a couple of hours after school this week working on our presentation for Chapter 3 (WEBLOGS). Basically, we put an outline together to highlight the major points in the chapter. It will include some important links that will offer additional resources for anyone interested in using their blog as a educational tool. We tried to think of a unique way to present the material to make it more fun.

On Friday, we went to Dodgen after school to work on our website designs. We were able to put in a couple of hours. I am making very small progress. I was really happy to find a site that had graphics that I like and purchased a great set of "puppy" graphics for just a few dollars. My Kindergarten class at school are known as "Porter's Pups", so I really needed some cute graphics to use in my page design.

Today, I am working on my webquest draft. I have spent a lot of time looking for well designed Kindergarten appropriate webquests in order to determine the best way to present the process and tasks involved in my topic. My young students will be dependent on adults to guide them through those tasks, but I want the sites that I post as links to be age appropriate as well.

Happy Halloween!

It looks like a wet night for the neighborhood trick-or-treaters. I hope everyone has a fun and safe evening out.

I've spent some time this afternoon working on our mid-term assignments for class. I was successful at designing and posting my survey on Survey Monkey. I decided to create a "kid friendly" survey called All About Me for my Kindergarten students to take part in. They will need their parent's assistance, but I think it will be very easy for them to follow. It will give them experience with multiple choice questions. It is similar to something we do daily in the classroom called "Question of the Day". They come in very excited every day to see what the question is and are able to respond by placing their name card under their selection choice. This particular survey will give us simple responses that can be easily graphed using a program called Graph Club that we have at school. It will be fun for them to see how the information they submitted at home can be seen back at school.

I also spent time reading the posts that are up so far for the first discussion question. Many of us have similar responses and feelings about how technology is being implemented in today's classrooms and can see how far ahead the kids are in their use and understanding in many ways. As a Kindergarten teacher, I'm glad that I get the chance to be one of their first experiences with many types of technology. They are eager and learn quickly. I believe they will be able to teach their parents along the way.

My next task will be to read Chapter 3 of our text and start planning for our presentation. It's called Weblogs: Get Started! Janie and I have plans to meet this week to get started. I'm looking forward to everyone's presentation. It will be a nice way to learn some very new material for me.

First day in ECOMP 6008

Today is the first day of my 2nd course in graduate school. It's called The World Wide Web as an Educational Resource. So far we've completed the following activities:
Survey Monkey Discussion
Internet Q & A: A Wired World
Social Bookmarking
Electronic Lists
Weblogs
Whew! A lot for one morning. I am anxious to implement several of these technology tools with my Kindergarten class and group of parents. Wish me luck!