Wiki comes through

We did our first day of News Team layout yesterday for our March/April issue. With MSA causing a 3-week delay in publishing, it gave the kids time to get all of the missing articles posted and all were there except Chris's 4th grade, which Elizabeth did for him. I would like to the reporters to control the font name and size on the wiki so the layout kids wouldn't have to adjust each article when placed in MS Word.

In the middle of MSA

MSA Reading has been given except for make-ups, and I'm getting ready for MSA Math. The 5 6th graders who took the Mod MSA online seemed to get along quite well, although it was certainly helpful to them to have one-on-one accommodators, online or not. As school test coordinator I'm really swamped with MSA right now and have had to cancel our News Team meeting this week. I encouraged the reporters to edit each other's articles carefully -- I sure hope they are. I haven't had time to check.

Uh oh!

I just checked the history section of some key pages of our News Team wiki and found that students have deleted each articles and/or made erroneous changes to them. Knowing which students did this tells me that it was accidental. However, a student told me yesterday that her article had disappeared from the wiki, and sure enough, it did! I'll track this down, talk to the offender on Monday, and discuss it with the whole team as soon as I can.

I need to be coming up with some idea for using podcasting.

Podcasting session

Podcasting was interesting today. I can see how it could be a very useful tool in a regular classroom for lots of content areas. It will be a challenge to work it into my News Team project, but since this is the only group of students I can call "mine," other than the keyboarders, I'm sure something will come to mind. It was funny how self-conscious the BES STEP teachers were -- we pretty much chose to type our responses, rather than speaking them. I noticed that teachers from other schools were more vocal -- I recognized good ole Robert Beaumier's enthusiastic voice. He's always upbeat.

URL: voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/k-2

STEP mtg next week - working on wiki

Working on my STEP wiki, creating the page to link to the News Team wiki. Including summaries, technology standards, banners, etc. Lots of work but it's good for me to be learning new things and using them often enough to remember them.