Setting up this blog has been a slow process for me. I am not completely there yet; I still need to move the avatar from Yahoo. I would much prefer a picture.
Last year I had one student who began blogging on a computer program my school has just begun to use. The program is called ANGEL (and lucky for them, they have recently been purchased!). My hope is to have all my students blog on a nightly basis; that is, if they can keyboard. I have been surprised at the number who are not comfortable with key strokes. For them I might try some sort of keyboarding program for 10-15 minutes or so and then ask for a sentence or two.
My kids, with the occasional exception, think that they cannot write. My theory is practice, practice, practice with a good dose of positive feedback. I think blogging could help this and I know they would love creating an avatar. I have to find out if we can create an avatar in Yahoo or somewhere else and then move it to ANGEL. I like the fact that Yahoo avatars are culturally diverse. The whole process will, I think, be great for "grabbing" kids.
Thing # 23
14 years ago
I have noticed the keyboarding issue with many of the students at my school too. I know that my third grade classes used the portable keyboards this past year every day and we have really seen improvement in the typing skills of our students. There is hope out there for your students.
ReplyDeleteYou may want to check out these keyboarding sites. I have used lessons from them in the past.
http://www.davis.k12.ut.us/cjh/appliedtech/Business/Keyboarding/
http://www.sense-lang.org/typing/
http://freeonlinetypinggames.com/
http://www.northcanton.sparcc.org/~technology/keyboarding/freeware.html
Because you can save a Yahoo avatar as a jpg image to your computer, I bet you could place them in ANGEL someway.
ReplyDeleteI'll be checking in on you from time to time. Let me know if I can help in anyway.
I am doing the 23 Things part 2...
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