Ana's Page

Hi. I'm Colleen. I am a second-year high school English teacher from Illinois. I am interested, now that I have survived my first year, in incorporating technology more into my classroom. I have started with a class blog resource, and I hope to grow from there. Thank you for putting this site together!

I didn't make my point, I tend to expect my reader to read my mind. Let me start over---one of the options for "what can I write about?" is allowing students access appropriate news feeds coming in to your site by RSS, rather than having them search willy nilly on the Web. So I was able to find news feeds appropriate for kids--here's the feeds we use http://areallydifferentplace.org/aggregator/categories We also link to a creative writing prompt site and have the option on the blog to write Books. Continue on....N

Brian, after looking at a bunch of different options, I decided on a ning for my classes to post their projects. I teach Digital Graphics & Animation and Video Technology to 9th-12th grades. I made the ning private so that only my students would be able to access it. I haven't tried it with the kids yet, but plan on doing so soon after school starts. I think it will be a good way for the students to learn uploading, as some do not know how, as well as to get them to critique each others work. I know you can upload video and audio with the ning and it does give you some control over what the kids can and can't do. Plus if you email ning help and tell them your ning is for 8-9th grade they will remove the google ads. Hope this maybe helps.

Thanks Nancy. Much appreciated. I think on 21classes you can elect to not have the RSS feed.

Have you seen Hyperscore? We used it when it was free, now it costs money but it is neat.