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.