First day back with the children today which is always good, finally getting them in to the classroom to see whether your furniture arranging was totally futile or not! I was pleased to see with my new Year 5 class that I have more space than I first thought I would. Perhaps I was imagining my Year 6 lot from last year!
So we got straight into talking about the class blog and as I did last year we posted our agreed set of class rules on our blog for you all to read. Those who have been following this space for a while will know that I used to have the Priestsic6 blog – that has now been passed onto Sarah Stamp the teacher taking over my Year 6 role. I have in turn inherited the Priestsic 5 blog which was begun by Mr O’Brien last year.
As ever we would love to hear your comments about our class rules and any connections you would like to make with our class of 9-10 year old kids. Our class laptops arrive tomorrow so I hope to increase the amount of blogging work we do in Year 5 with this technology at our fingertips – perhaps we can get reading your class blogs very soon.
Following on from my post regarding the use of Flickr I was kindly sent a link to FlickrCC, a search engine drawing solely from Flickr’s Creative Commons licensed images. After a quick look it is easy to use – your results are presented in a wall of thumbnail images which is really clear, gives you a range of sizes to download and an attribution link as well – making it all very easy to find great quality imagery. Many thanks to Joseph Williams at Sunrise Elementary School, Glendale Arizona for the link.
I hope you all had a good back to school day/s – and don’t forget to leave an encouraging comment for my young bloggers – we will be checking tomorrow!
You should also look at ALISON, http://alison.com.
It is a free to access resource for ICT courses online.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your work on your great blog. I thought I’d mention also the great service at Picnik (www.picnik.com), which is an online image-editing application. You can access your Flickr photos or search Flickr for photos (including narrowing down the search to CC images!) and then edit the images in your web browser (crop, resize, saturation, frames, effects etc.) before reuploading to Flickr or downloading to your PC.
Keep up the great work!
I would also like to look into linking classes for some cool interactive projects-Thanks!
Ryan Osweiler
http://portermsblog.edublogs.org – Tech Osweiler Page
Instructional Technologist
Woodbridge, VA
Hi Tom, though I love FlickrCC, I thought I would share a few others that were recently showcased by Patricia Donaghy at http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2007/09/22/finding-photos-with-cc-licenses/
Cheers, Judy
Hi Tom,
Thank you so much. I will definitely check your blog to get a greater understanding of SmartBoards in the classroom.
I came back here today because I came across the SMARTBoard Lesson Podcast #85 and recognized your name. It was a very good podcast and I thank you for sharing all your insight.
Cheers!
Jim
Thanks Jim and Greg for the comments – Jim you might be interested in some of my SMARTBoard work I have written about on this blog, I have been using them for about 5 years in my teaching – there isn’t much in the way of blog posts as it has just become part of the fabric of my work – but there are still some gems!
Greg – let me know if you have any classes that can link up with ours!
Thanks for FlickrCC – I love it and so do my colleagues from Wollongong, Australia.
Hello from Illinois, USA!
Love the blog and look forward to coming back for more informative sites to use in the middle school. The FlickrCC tool is wonderful and it’s a lot of fun to display all the pictures on the Smart Board and have the kids go up and view the different pics before class.
Your class rules are exceptional; they focus on the positive and should provide a good foundation for a successful year.
Cheers!
Jim