10/10/2013 october 10, 2013Third graders now have a published blog post with a "dot" of their own creation representing their "mark on the world". I would invite parents (pretty please), to make a comment to your child's blog. Just a sentence would do to let them know that what they write is being read by others. It is their first venture communicating with the outside world and they will be sharing several of their projects and demonstrate their learning throughout the year. Please be conscious of privacy issues and use only a last initial, or simply "Dad" or "Grandma" as you encourage them in their writing. All comments are reviewed by me before they go live. Once students had their first experience with publishing we talked about how much easier it would have been if they had been able to type the words in more quickly. That led to a discussion of keyboarding and good techniques, as well as the need for practice. The last two weeks they have been working in the Type to Learn 4 program, and doing a great job with it I might add. The program begins with a pretest and then an A and a B lesson to familiarize the student with all areas of the keyboard, before beginning actual lessons with the home row keys. I would encourage all families to take a look at the information on Keyboarding that I have provided and consider downloading the program free of charge to your home computer. All instructions are on that page and it is the same web based account the student uses in school, so the progress is continuous from home to school. After about 20 - 25 minutes of practice, which I think is enough for them in one sitting, they switched to a site to review math skills. This site is Arcademic Skill Builders and can be found as a tile on the cougartech webmix. This site forces them into developing rapid recall of facts because there are fast paced games where they compete with anonymous students from all over in a race to the finish. They can also start their own game that others can join. This site will be especially useful as they begin working on learning multiplication facts. Finally, I would like to comment on grading. The first quarter ends on Friday, November 1, and I have just posted grades in PowerSchool. Unless there is a very unusual circumstance, all students in grade three will receive a G for their work in the computer lab. Why? My philosophy is that at this age level they are all giving it their best shot, trying hard, and really want to succeed. They are enthusiastic, ready to learn and to take on new challenges. And in my opinion that is a "good" thing. There are many new skills that will be tackled, from keyboarding, to cut/copy/paste, to saving to a network location, to blogging, to using headers and footers. Some will grasp it more quickly than others, and some will need a little extra help, but they all will succeed at their own rate. I do not want any student to come away with the idea that he or she is "not good at" technology. I will help them as best I can to see that technology tools can make our work easier, help us to learn more, and also to have fun. Comments are closed.
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