Who Knew?

I am lucky enough to have worked in Special Education, prior to this year, therefore I had access to the Board E.A. to come and help me install Spec. Ed. programs such as Dragon and Kurzweil, as well she has trained classrooms to use Co-Writer and Write Out Loud. Any classroom teacher in our borad, HWDSB, can have her come in to train a small group of Spec. Ed. students or a whole class, just ask your L.R.T. Alot of Spec. Ed. programs are "helpful to all and necessary for some", a program such as co-writer, a word predictor software, is invaluable for your L.D. students. Helen Porter, one of our Board EA's went through the OESS software and showed me the OSAPAC website. I could not believe such a thing existed. I took all of my teacher training in Manitoba therefore I am not sure if teachers here are aware of the website through teacher's colleges here, but I have been teaching here for 10 years and I was not aware it existed. I'm thrilled to see that programs are not only matched to grade level, but also to curriculum expectations. WHAT A WONDERFUL PLANNING TOOL.



Sonia Johnston

Creating a classroom blog

I was just researching Classroom Blogs and Wikis by Doug Caldwell and it lead me to a sight on setting up a classroom blog, http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/233, and it suggested using pseudonyms and not mentioning local places or any identifying feature for the area at all so as to avoid internet stalkers, unsavory types who could lure your students in. Don't the risks outweigh the benefits in this case?

Sonia

Social Networking

Peter asked us to think about how many social network sites we know as well as the people who use them and I was surprised at the conversation that this simple assignment created. What about a site like Craigs List? My husband says that it is a social network site since people communicate, but isn't it a glorified classified site aimed at selling or marketing items? My son for example rented an apartment with a complete stranger that he met on Craig's list. The internet raises so many ethical questions for me, clearly not for my son, or people of his generation. Anyways back to the assignment, I know 7 people with a facebook account about 6 on MSN and I believe 2 of my students had a Myspace account, and if we're counting Craigs List I know 2 people that use that site frequently. Would you consider First Class a social networking site? What is the criteria? I purposely do not have a facebook account because I have worked extensively with behaviour students, many of them very adept at computer technology. I would not want any of my students to have access to my converstations or interactions with my friends in my personal life. Does anyone else share the same concern?

Sonia Johnston

Correction: Please the edit above article re edublogs, I was commenting on both Stephen Downes and Marc Pensky's articles. Overall I found Stephen's article to be repetitive and Marc's to be the more controversial of the two articles.

Too funny!

My friends at work are in hysterics that I set up a Blog and then could not remember my password to get back in. Problem solved, I have a new password now. Yesterday we had a field trip to the Science Centre in Toronto that lasted WAY too long, memorable moments included, child up-chucking on the bus, fire alarm going off in the Omnimax theatre and our bus driver knocking off the other bus's mirror as she was trying to park. Anyone else with end of the year field trip stories?

Sonia

I'm slowly figuring this out.

Technological Future?

Introduction

My name is Sonia Johnston and I have over 10 years experience with HWDSB and several school boards in Manitoba. This past year I have been teaching grade 6 at King George Elementary, prior to that I was a Learning Resource Teacher for 5 years at Janet Lee and then Queen Mary. Next year I will be teaching grade 4 at King George and I will be the I.T. liason for the school.

Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes

I am excited about the possibilities of blogging in our Language classes as well as Science and Math classes. I love the idea of having notes available to absent students and even step by step instruction to assignments and algorythms. I am not ready to say that teaching word order, sentence structure, math formulas and other lessons that can be handled readily through technology, is a waste of time. I am happy that less time has been devoted to things like word work and cursive writing in the elementary classroom, but that is influenced by my learning disabled child and my work with special ed students for the past several years. This past year I realized that many of my students miss such tasks as spelling tests, and garnered much of their self esteem from such tasks. I also work in the inner city and many of my students do not own a computer, their only access to a computer is the school and public libraries so technologically based learning is not education for all, yet.