For good: Sharing helpful information with people.  I follow a lot of educators and ask my network for help most of the time.  I offer websites and different strategies to whoever is listening.

For evil: Sharing every minute of your day.  No one cares that you just ate breakfast or you sneezed 5 times today.  If you do share that, you can at least share a recipe for your breakfast or the webmd link for your sneeze attacks.

Murrells Inlet – sadie-and-kylie

maleek

Here are some samples of their work…

Glenn – Spartanburg

glenn

Leslie and Leah – Pawley’s Island

leslie-and-leah 

Stay tuned for more commercials. 

Think again!!

We still have 2 partial weeks of school.

As far as the PACT test goes…I think most of my kids nailed it.  I received a pretty warm response to the test.  Of course, I had some students claim that I didn’t teach them anything this year, but those were the ones who didn’t bother to learn my name, let alone learn some history.  The kids that wanted to learn something…did learn something.  Now, I’m not saying they’ll remember it for next year, but I hope they’ll remember some of the major topics.

My plan for the last days of school are to work on a radio advertisement for a city in South Carolina.  With a little begging and handiwork, all of the computers in the Media Center have been equipped with audacity.   Let the games begin!!

I’m thinking about having the students create a radio commercial about a city in South Carolina.  After doing simple research on a city, they’ll have to put together a 60-second advertisement about their city of choice.  They’re main goal will be to attract tourism to their city.

The only part I’m struggling with is finding the proper program that has the ability to record, bring in music, and export as an mp3.  The only one that I’ve used is audacity.  This is a great little program, but it might be a little too hard for most of my 7th graders to get a grasp on.

Eventually, I’ll make them available as podcasts.

I might just have to suck it up and use audacity!!

I hope the kids enjoy this little project…it’ll keep them out of trouble during the last days of school.

Recently, animoto.com contacted me about the projects that my classes produced. Nothing special…but they informed me of a classroom password that can give your classes a 3-month all access pass to animoto and everything it has to offer. Although the longer videos might be too much for some students to handle, it is nice to have that option.

As of last night, my request from donorschoose.org has been fulfilled. That was extremely exciting news! If anyone out there needs something for their classroom, but can’t afford it or doesn’t have the budget for it, you have to check out donorschoose.org. I wanted a classroom set of microphone headsets for various projects that required them, so I asked for 30. The total bill was almost $400. Last night donorschoose.org sent me an email informing me that my project had been funded. Awesome!! I can’t wait to get my shipment, it’ll be like Christmas!!

I’ve also been contacted by the people of Create South. They call themselves a “grassroots group of Grand Strand Bloggers.” Create South is having a conference here in sunny Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on Saturday, April 18th and they asked me to present during a session about blogging in the classroom. I’m honored!! That’s pretty neat!! I hope I don’t disappoint. I’m hoping that there will be some teachers in the audience since I can relate to them, but if they’re not in the audience, then maybe they know some teachers they can relay the information to. Regardless, this will be a great experience. I’m looking forward to it.

Declaration of Independence

Here’s the latest…

Joseph Stalin