I loved Sara Weinberger's blog inviting students to speculate about the use of a historic artifact. (I have lots of old stuff. I could do this!)
I admired the way Mme Powell uses her blog both to share her writing and invite students to weigh in on everything from a description of a MN place or event to a question from Senator Michel about a longer school year.
With the Technorati, I traveled to Paris, saw a video of Virginia, MN, and viewed demo filmed in India. There is no end to the resources that are available. What I struggle with: what blogs or websites do I want to view frequently when I already have stacks of books downstairs that I have yet to read?
Yet, I do see the value of using blogs, videos, and websites for gaining information and motivating students. So, I will look for resources that will serve these purposes.
Last summer I set up a del.ici.ous account. Now it's time to return to that so I can put all the websites I visit in one place. So far, I have added the teacher resources referenced above to my bookmarks so that I can share them at school and use as resources. I also added :
PBworks.com, google.com, home of my school webpage;
Read, Write, Think, a vocabulary development site
Writing fix, a wealth of writing ideas from the Northern Nevada Writing Project
amazing photo gallery useful for prompting writing (inspired by the Odyssey Project shown in last week's class) and viewing images of MN.
So cool...I can spend hours and hours on this fun. Again, I need to have a clear goal in mind when I begin or I simply flit and float from page to page...
You could get lost in the fabulous resources on the Writing Fix website! It IS a great resource. I didn't know about the photo gallery site. What beautiful pictures! Do they fall under the Creative Commons copyright so you can save them for later use? Which ones have you used with 4th graders? What prompts did you give students?
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