On Friday, I arrived in San Antonio, Texas for a conference on education technology. The National Education Computing Conference (NECC for short) is put on by the International Society for Technology in Education (or ISTE). This is the first year I’ve attended the NECC conference and I’m very excited. I hope to return with a lot of ideas for lessons and activities for next school year.
I want to welcome Mrs. Quinn to Bellows Spring as the new part time technology teacher. Mrs. Quinn comes to us from Mount View Middle School.
I will let Mrs. Quinn introduce herself as she is also going to be a new contributor to The Techno Cheetah. Look for her posts in the near future!
We’ve been out of school for a little over a week now and the weather has been beautiful. But as the summer moves on there will be some rainy or extremely hot days when it’s better to stay indoors. So, when those days arrive, why not make your own website?
For students, creating your own website gives you an opportunity to share your interests with the world. For parents, creating a website is a motivating way to keep your child reading and writing during the summer.
The first step in creating your own website is to decide what you want your website to be about. Choose a topic that is interesting to you. Once you decide your topic, sketch or make a brief outline of how you want to organize your website. For example, if you wanted to make a website about video games you might want a general description of different kinds of video games on the home page and then create other pages about some of your favorite video games. There is no one right way to create a website, so be creative and have fun. You can always go back and add to or change your website.
There are two free websites I really like that make it very easy to create websites. My favorite is Weebly. With Weebly you just drag and drop the elements you want on your webpage. It’s easy to add text, pictures, and even videos. Google Page Creator is another tool that makes it easy to create your own website.
Both Weebly and Google Page Creator require a registration. Students, please get your parents permission before signing up for one of these websites and respect your parents’ rules for what you are allowed to post online.
If you create a website, please let me know and I will mention it on this blog so the Bellows community can see your work.
Mrs. Trudden, technology teacher at Pointers Run and Waterloo Elementary Schools, has more great rainy day technology activities on her blog.
Congratulations to Bellows Spring’s 5th graders who had their graduation ceremony today. Many of the graduates started at Bellows in 1st grade when the school opened.
Three special guests came to speak:
Good luck in middle school!
Students in all grade levels got to a chance to use Pixie on the new laptop computers this year. Pixie is a program where students can paint and manipulate pictures to design their own artwork. Over the summer, the latest version of Pixie, Pixie 2, will be installed on the tech teacher laptop computers.
Pixie 2 has some exciting new features including:
Below is an example of a video podcast I made with my 2 1/2 year old daughter, Morgan, using Pixie 2. This example demonstrates the ability to record narration on each slide and combine the slides together in a video. Morgan choose the pictures and recorded the audio (dad helped, of course).
Download
Two representatives from the Howard County Library, Ms. Debbie and Ms. Deborah, talked to each grade today about the library’s summer reading program. “The Deborahs” gave several wonderful book suggestions for summer reading.
If you need help finding a good book to read this summer check out Book Adventure. This Sylvan website is a terrific resource to help you find books that interest you at your reading level.
This post is directed towards Mr. Robb’s 3rd grade technology classes.
Think about all activities you’ve done this year in technology class. Then, using the sentence starters, leave a comment with your reflections about technology class this year.
