Earth Day

 Well I thought my last blog should be about Earth day, being it is Earth day weekend.  There have been a lot of different ways of celebrating this  time of year.  There are beach cleanups around this area.  The beach clean up is run buy all different groups.  There are some run by Paddle-boarding and kayak businesses.  They promote the beach clean up by renting their equipment for a discount so people will clean up the water ways and beaches as they paddle.  There are the scuba diving businesses that promote the reef and beach clean up.  They provide lunches and refreshments when you join them.  There are so many different opportunities out there to keep the Earth clean.

Some things that can be taught is about "green" living.  There are different ways to live green.  There are many different products that contain chemicals and are bad for the environment and so many alternatives to them.  In class you can have your students try to be toxic free.  Natural products can be used to create non toxic cleaners by using natural ingredients such as vinegar, water and essential oils.  Teaching children how to combine these things to make non toxic cleaners will keep them healthy while helping the earth.  Another way to teach your class how to be green is to teach them about recycling.  Making your classroom a recycle only
 classroom will show students how recycling is easy to do and this may carry over to their home life.

A good website to take a look at is Green Schools.  This site gives many great ideas on how to help your student learn to be 'green'.

What ways would you have your students celebrate Earth day?    Do you teach about Earth day and conservation in your classroom?

Cloud Drives

I was looking at the different cloud drives and how these can benefit teachers and students.  There are many different drives to choose from.  Some of the drives you can sign up for are: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and Skydrive.  When you sign up for these programs you can get up to 16 gig free storage.  These drives allow you to integrate them into your Windows program,  They run in the background and when you save a document you can choose to save directly to one of the cloud drives.   You can retrieve your document from any computer or smartphone.  There are even some tablets that you can see your document from.  Cloud drives are a great way to share documents with other people.  You can make folders to share with others.  It is a great collaboration tool.  There can be more than one person working on a document.
I use all of the different cloud drives.  They all have different attributes that work better for different applications.  In one of my classes we used the Google drive to collaborate.  It works great with Google + when we had meetings online.  It holds all of our documents and hangout notes.  This way if anyone missed a meeting then they could look back at the notes.  There is another program that links all the cloud drives together it is called Cloud Magic.  This program links all the drives into one place.  You set up all your accounts so you can search for any document.
I think this is a great addition for the teachers to share with their students.  This will help the student keep in touch with the assignments and you as the teacher.  How else do you think this may be useful?  DO you think this is a good fit for your class?

Project

Hobby project

http://kristinv.wikispaces.com/Hobby+Example+Page

By - Kristin Valenti

 This is a project I am creating for middle school children.  They will be using different technologies to create this project.   I will be teaching a technology class.  I want them to learn how to utilize all different types of software.  I also want to make sure they can use software that is free to use.  The student will also learn how to express themselves in different ways.  They will be creating a video of a hobby they enjoy.  I will have them create a video showing them doing what they enjoy.  They will have a choice of creating a how to for their hobby or do a research paper of a person who also enjoy their same hobby. 

I don’t teach yet so if you have any suggestions on how to put this together I would appreciate it.  Thank you for taking the time to look this over.