04+Fourth+Session

Our fourth session will focus on communication skills.

Ad predicted--we'll get to Jingthis session. . Jing lets you "whisper instructions in your students' ears" at any moment! The screencasts of our second session were all created with Jing.

It would be helpful to have Jing already downloaded and installed before our session. The 04 Our Screencasts page was designed to showcase the results of your efforts.

Our second skill will be blogging. You've already seen some education blogs via [|Trackstar]. There have also been some classroom blogs shared through Diigo (gotta keep up with the skills!). Why blog? Well, Seth Godin, author of Tribes, says it better than I can (and in under two minutes!).

media type="custom" key="4426255"

We have recently installed blogging software (Word Press, it's open source!). Check it out--our URL is voices.greensboroday.org.

Check out these two entries on a student blog from last year.

First entry (December)
I read the book called __The Tale of Despereux__. This book actually had a couple of different stories inside of this one book. This book was about different mice and rat’s stories.

Second to last entry (May)
Kidnapped: The Abduction by Gordon Korman is a bood filled with mystery, suspense, action, and adventure. This is the first book of this genre that I have read, and it was truly amazing! Kidnapped was the type of book that you couldn’t put down because of the puzzle that this story created, and the obsession that developed as I tried to solve the mystery. I could not keep my emotions constant as the story was like riding a roller coaster. As I read the book, there were times that I thought I had figured out all of the details of the story, but then there would be a twist and I was having to start the crime investigation from scratch. Without giving away the story, Aiden and Meg are brother and sister. They come from a family that is under the criticism of the town because the family is suspected of being criminals. The really odd thing is that someone wants to kidnap the children in order to make the family pay for their criminal activity. Their parents have just been let out of prison because they were sentenced for stealing money, and the children were constantly teased at school. It was very hard for me not to feel really sad for these two kids because they had no friends and they were shunned by the town’s people. Although this was a mysery adventure story, it had a moral. This book made me realize the tight bond between family and the love between siblings. It also discussed issues that are happening in the news today, like the necessary distrust of strangers in order to keep yourself safe. This story reminded me of the actual news reports about the little girl that was kidnapped from her hotel room when she was vacationing with her parents or about the numerous missing children whose faces appear on milk cartons. There were parts of this book that made me feel nervous and scared, but for some strange reason, I could not stop reading. I am anxious to read the other books in this series.