Open House is Wednesday!

Open House for Whittier is Wednesday, September 5 at 6:00 to 7:00 PM. I am looking forward to meeting you. I will be passing out information on Wikis and Blogs. I know some of my students are interested in creating their own blog. This is a great way to encourage your child to read, write, and publish for an audience.




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Posting to this Blog!

The students at Whittier are experiencing for the first time how to post to a blog.

To get started: I would like for you to tell me about your summer vacation. Did you visit family? What was one exciting thing you did over the summer? Respond to this post in the comment area!

Audacity!

I have been experimenting with audacity open source download for making MP3 files for podcasting.

I installed audacity on my laptop and was able to make a MP3 file without a microphone. My laptop was purchased in 2002 and has Windows XP.

Setting Audacity up was quite simple with the help of Audacity. Don’t forget to download LAME MP3 encoder so you will be able to export MP3 files from audacity.

If you want a simple way to have your students or children record and make MP3 files, this would be a good way to introduce the process one student at a time.




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Whittier School

The fourth and fifth graders at Whittier School are fantastic. The behavior and excitement from the students has been wonderful. The students are ready for school and want to be in their classrooms learning. As I talked to my students, they seem happy to be back to school and can't wait to get started with the wikis and blogs.

I discussed and introduced Adora in this blog in August. I have heard from Adora's mom who wants to set up a live video conference where Adora shows the fifth graders how to blog. This will be exciting. I will let you know more later.




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Whittier School Newsletter!

It will be another exciting day preparing for students coming back to school. My class has always been involved in reporting the news and writing articles for our newsletter. All of the students eventually contribute to the newsletter. The students love writing and learn a lot about editing their work from producing a product that is actually read by outside readers.

Look for our newsletter in September! The students will bring home a copy for you.

Here's a fun activity for writing!

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TrackStar

Teachers Going Back to School!

Back to school today with meetings and preparation of classroom. School starts Wednesday, August 22 for the students. Whittier starting and ending time is 8:15-2:45. There is an additional 15 minutes this year.

Above is a picture of some of the Whittier Staff celebrating the start of another school year!



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Poems for Kids!

There are many different types of poems (e.g., acrostic, autobiographical, ballad, cinquain, diamante, epitaph, haiku, limericks, and more). The website below was made with trackstar from http://www.4teachers.org/
4teachers has other tools for teachers that are worth checking out!

Below is one example of how you can use trackstar!
http://trackstar.4teachers.org/trackstar/ts/viewTrackMembersFrames.do?number=288912&password=




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Welcome Back to School!

I am very excited about this year’s adventures in computers. This summer, I attended the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta, Georgia where I learned about blogs, wikis, Web 2.0, Furl, tags, podcasting, edubloggers, social networking, facebook, RRS feed, elluminate, vodcasting, meebo, Ning, GoogleDocs, Google Earth, and more. The conference was attended by 18,000 individuals interested in making technology a priority.

We are now entering Web 2.0 which means we are using the Internet not only to read but to write and publish.

This year your child will be involved in working on blogs and wikis. Blogs are used to communicate thoughts, ideas, and opinions. In addition, people reading various blogs can post comments. Please visit this site frequently for information throughout the school year.

In addition, check out my wiki at http://paulpam2.wikispaces.com.

During the school year, we will be involved in various assemblies and field trips. Our open house is scheduled for September 5^th, 2007. Officer King is our D.A.R.E. instructor again this year. He will start D.A.R.E. sometime in September.

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Sedona, Arizona

Welcome Back to School!

The summer sure went by fast. Here is a picture of Sedona, Arizona; where I spent some time this summer visiting family. What a beautiful place to visit; the sky is clear, bright, and sunny everyday. Tourists were all over the place walking, talking, and buying the local wares. It was awesome to walk the streets of Sedona and feel the warm sun. Sedona is in the mountains so the temperatures never reach 110 degrees like down in Phoenix. It was a beautiful place to visit.

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Back from Vacation!

It is exciting to go on vacation as well as getting back and catching up on everything. I was visiting family in Arizona and Nevada and haven't been able to blog. The wonders of the Hoover Dam is still amazing.




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Talkr for Audio

As I read and write about the many things that the Internet has to offer, I came across audio for posts. You can make your posts available with audio by using talkr. Talkr is free and has easy instructions on how to make a podcast of your blog.

This is fantastic because there are audio learners who enjoy listening to posts being read. Now, posts can be visual as well as auditory. My students will enjoy making their posts with this audio feature.





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