Enrichment Day at VES

For one afternoon students at Village Elementary School (grades K - 2) chose special mini-courses that interested them outside of the regular curriculum. We were encouraged by our Horizon's teacher (pc for Gifted and Talented these days) to teach something out of the box and something that the students wouldn't normally expect you to do. The male PE teacher, a good friend of mine since high school, and I have a love for good food and cooking. Certainly something the students wouldn't expect from the two of us. Nor do most of the staff for that matter, so we chose to teach a course on French cooking. Using the Disney movie Ratatouille, and the cookbook by Thomas Keller inspired by the movie, we created a French cheese fondue for the students. Armed with plastic knives and skewers, the students watched part of the movie, and created one of the best cheese fondues I have ever tasted before. It's truly great to see students outside of the regular environment of school. We setup our fondue stations in the teacher's lounge, and the students were very excited to learn a new skill.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

eNewsletter June

The summer edition of the eNewsletter for teachers is out. In this month's issue, I focus on backing up your files. This is especially essential for educators in Maine as they must turn in their MLTI laptop to be reimaged by their IT department this summer. There are tips and tricks for backing up your files locally to your school's server or your own pen/external hard drive, as well as backing up your files to the cloud. There are many more tips for backing up things like bookmarks in Safari and Firefox, your iMovie files, iWeb domain file, and even your Sticky notes on the Tech Tip of the Week web site as well.

New Blog/Resource

The iDevices, or "Game Changers", as they have been called has inspired me to create a web page dedicated to implementing these devices into the classroom to enhance lessons and instruction in our schools. The district that I work in has seen these changes first hand with a few pilot programs this year using the iPads. Next year's budget will increase these pilots as we plan to purchase another 15 tablets. As these mobile devices take over our world, and we all know the kids will learn on them faster than we can catch up, it is important to develop a PLN of professions with tried and true practices for these devices and apps. For this reason, I have started a blog/resource page called iDevices in Our Schools. I'm hoping that this resource will grow as my own PLN helps to contribute ideas, resources, videos, and reflections on how they are using these types of technologies within their own classrooms. Any input would be great!