District Wide Information

Additional SMART Notebook Interactive Lessons - Holly Knudson, Todd Pickthorn and I worked together to purchase ready made MN state standards based interactive SMART Board Lessons for grades K-8 for Language Arts, Math and Science.  I sent information on Friday how you can access these lessons.  If you have any questions about accessing these lessons, please contact me.  Teachers in preschool and high school should consider accessing these lessons too since these lessons can be edited by you to meet needs for your classes.

Information for Park Side Teachers

SMART Response Systems - I was able to use the profits from the Park Side Book Fair to purchase two sets of SMART Response Systems (formerly Senteo).  As soon as these are processed for check out they will be ready for use.

District Wide Information

SocialBooks - I continue to read and follow new aspects inregard to ereaders and ereading.  The following link is an app coming soon to The App Store.  The premise of this is being able to read a book together with a friend or in an online book club and share reactions to the story or making notes or highlighting excerpts with those reading online too.  This is a way to make ereading social.  Check out the video found on this site to learn more about SocialBooks! (This is a YouTube video so you will need to access it outside of school.) http://www.getsocialbooks.com/ 

The Committed Sardine - http://www.fluency21.com/blog.cfm 

his blog offers many topics related to what is happening in the news in relation to technology, articles of the history of technology, technology and education, and much more including a recent article titled "How To Use YouTube at School, Safely.  http://www.fluency21.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=1720  This article presents a new free website called VuSafe that lets educators search for relevant video content from YouTube and other sources.  Read this article to find out more about this new resource to allow you, as an educator, to integrate YouTube videos into your classroom.
Why the "committed sardine?"  Check out the left side of the blog with the link to committed sardines http://www.fluency21.com/sardines.cfm

District Wide Information

"Can Ebooks Help Bridge Achievement Gaps?" is the found at the link below from the blog The Committed Sardine.  I find many articles in this blog that ponder many questions in regard to 21st Century learning.  Check out this article and consider joining The Committed Sardine blog.   http://www.fluency21.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=1704

District Wide Information

E-Readers - E-Readers may be a consideration to engage students in reading.  The following article makes me think more about this as an option for students in our classrooms.  I welcome thoughts from teachers about e-readers in the classroom.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/books/05ebooks.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha3

Congratulations!  Deb Herrmann was the winner of the January Media Info Bits blog comments.  Please continue to post on this blog or send your comments to me via email.