Best Week Ever

This week we are deep in NJASK prep so I am lucky to have been stimulated by some recent (and old remnants in my reader):
Best Interview with a Principal
Larry Ferlazzo's Best of List
10 Best Videos for Promoting Educational Change
Best Way to Start your Language Arts Class Today
Best Wiki for a Media Specialist

Announcing Our Class Blog

Here is our class blog, Hartman Hoopla. Trying it out for the rest of the year. The content is student created, kind of like in "A Week in Review" format. Each week a student is chosen using the Slot Machine from classtools.net.
Hopefully, we can start out next year in September and invite parents to comment.

American Idol Rejects

3rd Marking period Independent Reading Projects- Students could read any genre they please. Their project was to write a rap/song/poem or to make a collage. Both projects had to include a written reflection. Out of 65 students I got 60 collages and 5 songs. The songs were unbelievable. The students recorded them using Audacity and then we uploaded them into gcast. From gcast we can listen to them or you can upload them into your iTunes. We now have an all-out iTunes war going on. Whose song will be downloaded the most?


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Oh, Crapitalization!

Grading research paper before 3rd Marking Period papers. I've proofread, a buddy has proofread (even made the buddies read the second drafts backwards), Microsoft Word has spell-checked, the 6th grader writer has proofread (a very big assumption), but still sooooooo many mistakes.
So, I hand back the papers, covered in red ink, and a student who sits in the back looks over my comment, grade and proofreading marks and exclaims, "Oh, crapitalization!"
That sums up the day perfectly.

Better in the Middle

I have always felt that middle schools suffered from "the middle child syndrome." But you can get help - at the NJMSA. Last Friday our 6th grade guidance counselor and I traveled to Kean University to attend and present. Our topic was Easing the Transition from Elementary School to Middle School. While the guidance counselor did a great job of explaining our transition program and the research that backed it, I explained the technology aspects. We created a wiki, http://betterinthemiddle.wikispaces.com/,
for examples on how technology can be used as a tool to aid in transitions for parents, teachers, and students. Everyone who attended our session was eager to join, some wiki-ing for the first time ever. Hopefully we can all come together with some ideas on smoothing out the transition process and pay a little more attention to the needs and concerns of the "middle child."