I NEED WEBSITE HELP!

Yes, this is one of the important moments in the early planning stages of someone or something's life. My classroom website for next year is nearing its completion and quite frankly, I'm not sure if it is good enough! Well, that was a lie. I am not concerned with whether it is "good" or not - I don't make website for a living, I don't expect myself to make an amazing website. I want to make sure that it is simple, educational, and resourceful for my students next year.

If you have not seen the website and would like to help me out, I would absolutely LOVE your feedback. Here is the link: Mr. Stag's English Class.

Now, like I said the main things that I would to provide for my students are simplicity, educational information, and educational resources. So, here is what I am asking you (who ever you happen to be - if you are even real!):

1. Is is simple enough? Does the layout of the NJ Standards, Classroom Info, and Web 2.0 tools lend itself to easy exploration? Or, are there too many link and too many places to get too?
2. Obviously, I plan to update the educational resources as the school year goes on, but as you may have noticed I have three main areas for the students to retrieve educational information: class announcements, popular news, and reading lists. Do you think this is enough? Or, should I add a section solely for the purpose of supplementary information for the various topics that we will study throughout the year?
3. My resources - I chose a few Web 2.0 tools that I thought would help the students in various situations. Sometimes the tools serve to educationally entertain the students if they get done an assignment early, other times they are used as a tool in the strictest sense of the word (Cramberry, Citation Machine), and sometimes they are used to enhance creativity in an innovative way (Wordle.) But, my question to you is this: are these tools too much or not enough? Or, is there any tools that you would add or take off my list?

If you do feel inclined to respond, please respond with specific feedback, so that I am able to take it into account and make some effective changes. Or, feel free to send an email or give me a call!

Snag-Ems!

"Snagit," for those of you that don't know, is an amazing tool by the ingenious people over at TechSmith (<-- NOTE: If you would like to download Snagit, click there!) The tool is similar to Jing - once again, if you don't know what Jing is or how to use, it is an amazing powerful tool that educators can use to manipulate images they find online - in that it allows users to take images from their computers and then edit the images, but it takes the functionalities of Jing MUCH farther.

Snagit is the tool that I used to create my entire American Pop Culture Project: Video Games. It allows you to an image, a portion of an image, or a series of images and add anything from various texts, arrows, shadows, shading effects, and more. As Educators we can use this to highlight important aspects of a picture or to point out to the students how they should view images.

Snagit also serves as a great way for students to CREATE images based on the work of others. I could not begin to count the times that I have trouble with encouraging student creativity. Often times, I hear responses like "I dont know how to draw," "I'm not creative," or "if I do that it will look stupid;" snagit has the potential to eliminate that feeling amongst students! Snagit allows the students to take work and then use a program to add their own, scaffolded artistic twists to the images. Assuming I have more computer access for my students next year, I am going to get them to use snagit. This gig is going to get great! (see what I did there? oh yea, thats the good stuff.)

Tweeting on Twitter???

I have been experimenting with twitter over the past couple of days and I must say that is has been pretty interesting so far. Its so interesting to me because I have almost NO idea what is going on when I am the website. There is a ton of symbols - have notices quite a few RT's and @'s and #'s - which are indecipherable to me. Many people that I have am close with (colleagues and friends alike) absolutely rave about twitter, and to be honest: I want to rave about it too! However, at this point I just do not get it.

Aside from the whole "language of twitter" I also remain confused on what is the purpose of twitter.

What does twitter want from me?!

For Chris-sake this question keeps me up at night! Am I supposed to be sharing my thoughts about random occurrences in my life like some people do? Does twitter want to know my thoughts on the rain, the sun, the sewage goes away on my street, my favorite cracker? Or is it more serious: I often feel like I am supposed to wait until I have some thing incredibly profound to say. Something that will shock the world! However, the problem with that is that these thoughts rarely occur for me. So, what is a boy who is trying to tweet do? Maybe I should tweet about it??????

(Warning: This next part has NOTHING to do with twitter.) Also, I have been impressed with the amount of emails I am receiving from AP students for their summer reading assignments. The large majority of the students seem to love the challenge of a summer reading assignment. So, my fellow teacher brethren, why are we not assigning more summer reading?! Next year??? Whose in?

The Trouble with Technology

The trouble with technology is that it is too new sometimes!