Social Networking

Should social networking be allowed in our public schools? Can they be used in meaningful ways in education? If a teacher has a Facebook page, should they "friend" their own students? What if the page was only setup for educational purposes?

Summer Activities

This summer I am taking a master's course from Lesley University on designing curriculum with state and national technology standards integrated into them. I am also hoping to be working for a company that travels to different summer rec. camps around the area to teach children about solving real world problems using technology. At the end of August, I will be helping to organize a summer technology camp for the teachers in York. We will start off with a giant treasure hunt all around York using GPS units. What do you plan to do this summer?

Comic Life Biographies

Second grade at Village Elementary School have been busy researching famous people from the United States to complete a biography report. As a wrap-up project this year two classes, Mrs. Moody's class and Mrs. Audet's class decided to create a comic of their famous character. Using Plasq's Comic Life, the students pulled pictures from their research into a project and made the characters come to life with speech and thought bubbles describing their most famous events. A slideshow of the students' work is available online at www.yorkschools.org/~elawson. Check out the great work these students did on this project.

Testing, Testing, Testing

The students at both Village Elementary School and Coastal Ridge Elementary School have been busy in the labs and in our mobile lab (laptops set up in a portable classroom) taking standardized testing on the computers. Students Kindergarten through second grade are busy taking the CPAA tests to test their reading and math skills, while the students in third and fourth grade are busy taking the second edition of the NWEA tests to test their reading, language usage and math skills. Scores from the fall will be compared to the new scores this spring to evaluate student improvement over the school year.

School Web Sites

The new school web sites are up and running. I didn't love the template that I had to work with, but the information is clear and I believe it is easy to navigate through the entire site as well. I am getting excited to see more and more teachers taking the opportunity to update their own web pages and create new online interactive content with their students. I have always been a firm believer in creating quality content first and publishing second rather than the opposite way around. You can view the Village Elementary School web page at www.yorkschools.org/ves and the Coastal Ridge Elementary School web site at www.yorkschools.org/cres

February Break

We had  a great February break here in Maine. It was nice weather at the beginning of the week and then we got three snow storms towards the end of the week. In fact, we had a two hour delay on Monday (our return day) due to 8 more inches of snow over night.

We are back to school now and several new projects have started in the computer labs at both VES and CRES. Below is a list of grade level projects that the students will be working on over the next couple of weeks. I have been working closely with Mrs. Kaknes' class to develop and edit renewable energy commercials for a service learning project. These commercials will be played during our monthly CRES News Broadcast and will also be shown on the web page and our local access television channel.

Computer Lab topics at Village Elementary include;

Kindergarten - Creating 100 squares using Kidpix

First Grade - Office Scott will be in to talk to the kids about Safety and the Red E. Fox Program

Second Grade - Is continuing their projects on word work using Kidspiration 3

Computer Lab topics at Coast Ridge include;

Second Grade  - Word Work and Math Practice using EM Games and Kidspiration

Third Grade - Maine animal projects and service learning Keynote presentations

Fourth Grade - Simple Machines using Ed Heads and Energy Videos

Web Pages

For the past two weeks I have been put in charge of creating the new web pages for both elementary schools that I work for here in York, Maine. Creating web pages is nothing new to me. In fact, I had to create a web page in college to prove my computer literacy for teaching. Of course the technology has changed a great deal since then. Since that time I have created 6 web pages for teaching, social networking and one business. I have to admit that I prefer building web pages that are more personal to me, or at least a project in which I have the focus on the direction of the page layout.

In creating the two pages for Village Elementary School and Coastal Ridge Elementary School, I have found a few bumps along the way. The first is the software used to create the pages. Given a template, I was supposed to create a web page for each school that matched the other schools in the district in style, but still conveyed the message of an elementary school. I found that to be a harder task than I originally had thought. There isn't the complete freedom using our First Class email software to create web pages, and the style cannot change too drastically after a template has been created either.

The other bump that I had anticipated was working with an entire staff to come up with a web page that reflected everything that we do here at the elementary schools. I knew there would be a lot of information and links to add, but I did not realize that ideas and focus would be so far spread within the same staff. I have asked for advice and received some great feedback, but often the ideas conflict with one or another. This has made it challenging to construct the web page in a timely manner.

The web pages are supposed to be published by the end of this month, so even writing this blog has taken some time away from finishing the pages. I supposed part of my February break will be used to finish this task before our deadline.

My advice to anyone that would like to create their own web page is to look around the web and get some ideas and then to story board how you would like the web page to look in style and organization and how to display your content. That would certainly have helped me before I had begun this task.

And the Winner Is...

Many students participated in the Comic Life challenge and did a fantastic job. Some students used computer programs, while others drew their comics. Great job to all of you that entered the contest. You are all winners. I have placed a slide show of the comics that students submitted on my web page. You can view it http://www.yorkschools.org/~elawson/?OpenItemURL = S00E52C70

Snow Day

Well, it's another big winter and Maine, so we are at home with another snow day. The students are wrapping up their Comic Challenge projects. I will review these and post a slide show on my website as soon as these are edited and ready for the web.

On another note, we have had a few classes join Blogger.com. I would like to recognize Mr. Harris, Ms. Switzer and Mrs. Kaknes' classes for joining the Web 2.0 and starting a class blog. The students have been very excited to start these projects. I have seen some extended learning first hand as students from Ms. Switzer's class have started online conversations from outside of the classroom. Great work!

Creating Your Own Blog

It's fast and simple to create your own blog. You can sign up for a free account here on Blogger.com. First think of what you would write about? Would you be able to write something new on your topic each week? Each day? Who would you like to hear from in your blog?

If you make your blog interesting, you may get readers and comments from all over the world. Make sure you ask your parents before you sign up and then let me know what your blog address is, so that I can link it and follow your blog.

Blogging

Today a 4th grade class will be responding to their friend in Paris, France via a blog. They will also setup their very own classroom blog to report out to the world what they are learning. As part of the blog, the students will also be writing newspaper articles and broadcast a live news show for the school. This news broadcast will be available on the web shortly after production on January 30th. Check back to see what this class has been working on.

Comic Life Challenge

As I thought we did have a snow day yesterday, so school was closed for the day and nobody came into the computer lab. 

This month I have setup a challenge for the students. Previously, I had created two comics a month; Where in the World is Mr. Lawson? and The Adventures of Mr. Lawson. The first comic was a geography lesson for the students where I presented clues to a country I had visited. The students tried to figure out which country it was and either emailed or wrote a note to me with their guess. The Adventures of Mr. Lawson talked about the time of year and introduced staff members within the elementary schools to explain more about their programs. The challenge to the students is to create their own comic. A winner from each grade level will be chosen and posted on the web page. Good luck to all the students!

Travel Blog

I have created one blog before on my trip across the United States this summer with my sister. We took US route 90 for most of the trip, but found time to stop along the way from Boston to Seattle. Check it out at; http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Lawson

First Blog

Today I am just setting up the blog. The students are back in school here in York, but snow is in the forecast for tomorrow. We'll have to wait and see if we are in session tomorrow or not.