Pandora Radio

I love using this site for music. My personal favorite is the Norah Jones radio station. You can listen to your favorite songs without commercials and the added bonus of variety.

http://www.pandora.com/

Wordle

This is a really cool site:
www.wordle.net
You can go here and make word art with the words. From the website:
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

VoiceThread

I created this using jingproject.com

Click on this link to learn how to use VoiceThread.
http://www.screencast.com/t/LAX0DSrkj

Awesome Website!

Check out this site!
http://classtools.net/

Once you find a template, you can then customize to what you want to create. You can also add them to your blog like I did below by using the embed code. This is found on the lower right hand side of the screen.

Click here for full screen version

This is so cool....

Go to this website to get this cool tool... http://classtools.net/ Choose the template: random name picker Then, you start by entering your students names. When you click on fruit machine, it will draw their names randomly. Another idea is to use with teams and have them look up vocabulary words.

Click here for full screen version

Blog Video in Plain English

More Teacher Blogs

Here are some more blogs to check out.
http://smathis80.blogspot.com/

http://mrkuhnslearningsite.blogspot.com/

http://4trumantigers.blogspot.com/

Several teachers have expressed concern about how to get parents and students to read their blog. A few thoughts:

1. Try to start sending an e-mail every time you blog. You could use your parent e-mail group and add a link to your blog right in the e-mail. All the parents have to do is click on that hyperlink.

2. Involve the students in blogging. Use a writer's workshop session to have authentic writing sessions where students post comments to the class blog. Then they will want to go home and post to the blog.

3. On your homepage, add your blog to the navigation bar. To do this, add a new page called "Custom Links." In the web address, you will want to copy and paste your blog address.

4. Show parents how to subscribe to your blog. This will help them to know when you have added to your blog.