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