Thing #9

Someday when I have a beautiful car to drive I am going to get this license plate for it. I am a true animal lover.

I think my students will love playing with these "toys" online and making their own comic strip and license plate. It was interesting to mess with the license plate sight to get the writing in just the right spot and just the right size. I really wanted the whole word off of the blue but this was the smallest font size it had. So then I worked to adjust the word down to the center and over to the right to get it positioned just right. Once I got it where I wanted it I felt very self-satisfied. I know the students will love doing this.
There are so many neat sights that I didn't even know existed before this class. How fun it will be to be a step or two ahead of our students on web stuff. I can't wait to show my kids all the fun they can have while they are learning at the same time.

Thing #8

I had a really fun time playing with flickr spell. I spelled all kinds of things and decided I liked this set of tiles the best. Playing with flickr spell gave me some great ideas for my ESL reading class. I am going to have them use this with spelling words and to create unique stories. Playing with spelling tiles is fun but when each tile is so different it makes it so much more fun.

I struggled with how to get the tiles on my blog. I worked for a while before I realized you had to put it under the edit Html to get the tiles to come out correctly. I think once I play with this kind of thing more it will become easier to remember the little inuendos of each thing.

Thing #7

This is my son, Clint. He will be a senior this year. He was all dressed up for the band banquet at Poteet. I can't believe my baby will be a senior.

My other son is going to Tyler Junior College in August. I really hope God blesses him with better study skills than he had in high school! Ha!

Flickr was a great thing to learn about. I have already sent and received photos from a good friend in Prince Edward Island, Canada. We haven't seen each other in years and got to trade family photos with the click of a button. I wish I w0uld have known about this sooner. It is fun, saves time and really helps keep photos organized. I like the fact that you can make your photos public or just keep them for friends and family.

Thing #6

I decided to go to a book sight because I teach ESL Reading and reading for pleasure is one of my hobbies. I ended up at Biblio.com out of pure selfishness because I was looking for a book that goes with a series I am reading. I didn't realize until I had read books two, three and four of the series that I had actually missed the first book. I get most of my books from Half Price and of course they didn't have the first in the series on the shelves. Borders didn't have it and the nice lady proceeded to tell me that it was out of print. I was dying to find my missing first book.

When I found Biblio.com I decided to be a good student and started looking at children's books and books that I can get for my class that have a spanish and english version. After I played around for a while I had to look here for my missing book one. Guess what? They had it and it only cost one dollar. This is my lucky day. I ordered my book one and I also found an english copy of a book that I already have in spanish that my beginning speakers love. What a great sight for eductional books and not so educational books.

Thing #5

I believe the future of this country is certainly moving towards computer literacy. If you are not computer literate you will miss out on a lot of information and fun that the web has to offer. As an English teacher I like web 2.0 much better than the text messaging on phones. At least on the internet it is still important to spell words correctly and be literate in English. Students need to understand that even though we are becoming a society of internet users it is still important to write grammatically correct.

I don't particularly like MySpace and other similar sights because of problems it causes when parents don't actively monitor their child. We as educators and parents need to warn our children and students to be very careful about personal information they give out online without even thinking. Although I don't really care for these types of sights I do see a benefit.
Children that wouldn't normally read are more likely to read a friends MySpace or blog than sit down and read a book. The more a child reads the better reader they will be.

It is a challenge for teachers to keep up with the newest web information. I feel like most of my students are way ahead of me when it comes to using the internet. We, as teachers, need to keep up with the latest trends in education, but there is so much information that it can seem mind boggling.

Thing #4

I have found that responding to others blogs not only helps you meet new people but reconnect with people you never get to see. I have thoroughy enjoyed reading and responding to the blogs of people that I don't know and end up with a feeling that you have a new friend. Blogging with someone that you know but haven't seen in a while is really great. It is like finding a long lost friend.

I started out reading The Blue Skunk Blog just because it sounded interesting. What a great blog name. The Blue Skunk was informative but I really loved the Ten Commandments of Blog Commenting. We as teachers know that we should be polite and not condescending but a lot of people in our society today don't even think about those things. Where would we be without the original Ten Commandments and for blogging these ten commandments are very important. I copied the Ten Commandments of Blog Commenting and plan to keep it handy as I start blogging more.

I will ad the names of those I blogged as I get them finished.

Thing #3

There are a ton of ways I can use blogging in my teaching. This will be a great tool to help my ESL students use everyday english and learn how to spell the words at the same time. I think an emergent english speaker will feel more comfortable blogging with other students about familiar things than writing things on notebook paper. Being able to blog with other ESL students will give the students a sense of freedom to talk about similar likes and not feel pressured to use the correct word or pronounciation of a word. Their blogs can start out simple and as they learn our language better they can expand their blogs.

Getting kids to write is difficult but this will be a "judgement free" zone because they are writing their opinions and not having to recall facts and details about a given subject. I hope this will help the students feel more comfortable using english every day.

Thing #2

This was a fun thing! My grandfather called me kelligirl so that is a special name to me. When I tried to use kelligirl as my blog name it was already taken. I looked at some of the other names and decided parmentersplace was appropriate. I had a blast creating my blog. It wasn't hard for someone who hadn't done this type of thing before.
The avatar was a blast. I really had fun dressing my girl up and picking out the background etc. She looks like me about 25 years ago. I was definitely the cowgirl chic. The golden retriever looks like my Kelsey. When it came time to put my avatar on my blog I ran into some trouble. After an hour of trying to figure it out I got my 16 year old son to come explain it to me in "incompetent mom" terms. After that I did it without any problems.

Thing #1

I am very excited to be going on this online journey. I hope to learn some things that can help my ESL students learn to read and write better. Setting up my blog was pretty easy. I tend to get ahead of myself and have to go back and reread instructions. I am sure this will be a journey in patience as well as learning. I hope to learn enough in this class to stay up with the teenagers of our society.

As a teacher with 20 years experience I am commited to being a life long learner. Last year I switched from teaching music at the elementary then secondary level to teaching English. I was offered an ESL position so last summer I got my ESL certification. I absolutely love teaching middle schoolers but I really wanted to teach reading. This coming year I will be teaching ESL Reading. I am thrilled! I accept responsibility for my learning and face problems as challenges. This summer I am doing the Rosetta Stone spanish course so that I can better communicate with my beginning english speakers.