Today I am visiting 6th Grade Spanish! I am watching the students show their Google Map tours of cities in Spain. They researched different cities in Spain, choosing five to seven places of interest. They worked with a partner and marked the places on a shared Google Map. Today they are showing the places they chose, using street view of the places if possible. What a great project!
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It is now October, and the year has been passing quickly. In the district we are in our first year of a new district technology plan. There are many things we are working on this year. Here are just a few!
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I am really excited to start the new school year! I had a busy summer. I went to Florida for a wonderful vacation with my daughter. I spent some time with my sisters and my parents as well. The summer passed quickly while I prepared the computers for the school year. I am looking forward to working with the Get Techy Club again this year. Welcome back everyone!
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I was at the ICE conference on Wednesday, February 23 and learned about a video contest. We have very talented and creative students at Marie Murphy. I hope that some of them will participate in this 90 second video contest. Here is the website with all of the details!
Students, if you would like to participate come and see me!
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I am really excited to report that we used cell phones for the first time in 6th grade as a learning tool! We used it as a discussion tool for a review of a story that they students read in English class. Here are a few pictures of the activity.
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I attended the National School Boards Association’s Technology+Learning Conference in preparation for our technology planning this year. I nominated Stephanie Rick for the 20 to Watch award. This award honors educational technology leaders who will be worth watching for the next 20 years. Stephanie was chosen as one of the recipients. She received the award at the conference in Phoenix, Arizona which was held October 19-21. I was attended many sessions where I learned some of the best practices related to technology in education. I am excited to share these things with the staff members in our district.
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This summer has been quite busy for me. I have been learning my new job as the district Technology Coordinator and Technology Facilitator at Marie Murphy. I decorated my office with some paraphernalia from Purdue, my alma mater. A friend of mine brought in a unique decoration which I think will be enjoyed by many students and staff this year. If you come to Marie Murphy, you will have to stop in and check “him” out! When I wasn’t working, I kept busy playing with my five year old daughter, Anya. I also began training for the Chicago Marathon which takes place on October 10th. I am thrilled to be starting the new school year at Marie Murphy!
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We are gearing up for the “Grow-Green” fund-drive, sponsored by our student council. It is scheduled to begin this Thursday, April 22nd (Earth Day) and end on Friday, April 30th (Arbor Day). The student council would like to raise money to give EVERY classroom at Avoca West the opportunity to help plant the garden adjacent to our newly installed Earthworks landscape. The projected cost for this phase of the garden is $3500. We have reached 50% of this goal through the earlier fundraising efforts of our student council and the outdoor classroom committee. The work our student council has already done has made the news! Check out this article… Chicago Tribune Article
Just look at what your donations can buy:
Donations will be collected in the north gym first thing every morning of the drive. Checks can be made out to… “The Avoca PTC Outdoor Classroom Account”
If you can, please help our garden Grow! We are so excited to get our hands dirty and plant!
To learn more, here is a link to our Outdoor Classroom Webpage
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Recently, I taught a community technology class on Skype at my school. We offer free technology classes for residents of our school district community a couple of times during the year. I had such a great time! We used laptops (MacBooks) to learn how to use Skype. All attendees learned how to instant message, voice chat,and video chat using Skype. You can download Skype for free at http://www.skype.com/.
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I attended the ICE Conference (Illinois Computing Educators) last Thursday and Friday in St. Charles, Illinois. I gave two presentations with my colleague Chris Brown. One presentation was called Powerful Professional Development and was about the technology professional development provided in our school district. The other was called Blog Wild and was about the student blogging happening in grades kindergarten through 8th grade in our district.
I am very proud to be a part of such an amazing technology team here at Avoca. Beth Haugeberg gave a presentation on using technology in the primary grades. Kim Zimmer did a full day workshop about Google Apps for Education on Wednesday at the conference.
In addition to presenting, I attended some great sessions for my own professional development. Dr. Robert Marzano gave the keynote address on Friday titled Classroom Instruction and the Infusion of Technology. He specifically discussed his research on student achievement in relation to instruction via Promethean Boards. I am very interested in his research as we use Promethean Boards here in our school district. He believes that every classroom in the world should have an interactive whiteboard. It will be very interesting to see what our world’s classrooms look like in ten years!
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Recent News from Mrs. Soriano
