eMates Save the Day!

Used by permission (Sonny Hung)

The more I play with them, the more impressed I am with the old eMates a colleague rescued for us. Their main application suite includes a word processor, a spreadsheet and a drawing program, all of which are intuitive and responsive. The eMates came loaded with an interactive tour […]

coComment!

One of my frustrations with blog comments is that when I leave them, I forget to go back and follow the conversation. That has made me hesitant to ask questions in the comments sections of blogs. Fortunately, that is all changing thanks to coComment!

Here’s how it works…

Go to their website. Set up a […]

Sharing the Things They Care About

I am just starting individual blogs with this year’s group of fifth graders. I have been wondering how to set up my curriculum so that my students are reading and responding to blogs outside of our community. I may have hit upon a bit of a plan. As I introduced the blogs, I told them […]

The Evolution of an Essay

Essays and fifth graders are not a natural combination. Unlike most of the forms of writing in the fifth grade curriculum, children have no experience with essays. No one sits their preschooler on their knee and reads them essays. No one is making picture books or children’s movies of essays. In short, I’m asking them […]

Moodle Evangelizing

I was writing a letter to a dear friend and former colleague. I was blathering on about…

what I’ve been doing with the Moodle how it is helping me get a handle on my overwhelming paperwork how the children are appreciating the immediate feedback on quizzes how my students who hate to read and write […]

Workshops or Assignments

I’ve been exploring Moodle’s workshop module. For now, I learned it is too complicated for me to use with my current essay assignments. I really love the idea that students would be scoring and commenting on their own and two other students’ essays based on the rubric I gave them. Unfortunately, I had trouble getting […]