Sep
27
2009
Although we have PC’s at work, I am an Apple person at home. My latest discovery is a drawing program for my Mac called Seashore, available as a free download from SourceForge. No artist am I, but I have had such fun exploring the program and making my first drawing.
scenic view
The PC’s at school have drawing programs such as Paint and FireWorks, for which we have a site license. Imagine the creativity you can unleash in your students by allowing them to use the technology available to enhance their assignments.
Jun
14
2009
It is a busy time of year for all of us in education; but it is difficult to believe that it has been almost a month since my last post. The last weeks have been filled with a variety of activities including:
prepping for SOL tests and enduring the testing process (ongoing, as we are in the midst of expedited testing);
identifying, moving, and surveying 56 old computers, cleaning up the tables for the new ones; receiving the new computers, getting them to the proper locations, and continuing to set them up — they arrived with Office 2003, so now they need 2007 installed on all of them;
coordinating the Awards Assembly for our student body, fortunately with a co-chair and a great committee;
and finally, preparing for the new Renaissance Academy with new orders arriving almost daily, where each box must be opened, verified, resealed, and put in storage, and working on the Web site for the new school.
Developing the Web site reminded me of ways to integrate technology. The new Web site has an embedded Animoto short video of pictures taken with my Blackberry Storm after a tour of the new building under construction; free technology online is engaging — capture the attention of your students with a short Animoto video to introduce a lesson! One of the treasures here is the ability to integrate technology with little work or time involved on your part; or better yet, have your students take the pictures and create the video! I also worked with the new Renaissance Academy logo in FireWorks 8, a powerful program for editing graphics; our school has a site license of an older version, which is still very powerful.
