Giveaway ends tonight!!

Tonight at 9PM central time, my giveaway for a back to school $10 Amazon gift card will end. To enter you can:
1) Follow my blog
2) Post about my giveaway.
3) Check out my wiki.

Leave a comment for each that you do and good luck!

Last Day for my Giveaway!! as well as some more Giveaway info....

The last day for my giveaway of a $10 back to school Amazon.com gift card is tomorrow. I will pick the winner @ 9PM tomorrow night! Please make sure you enter. You have 3 chances. Follow my blog, blog about my giveaway or check out my wiki. Leave a separate comment for everything you do. Hope to get lots of entries tonight and tomorrow.

Also check out Third Grade Meanderings who is giving away a copy of Miss Malarkey Leaves No Reader Behind     AND a $20 gift card to Barnes and Noble. Who doesn't need that?

Make sure you check it all out!

Sound Sleeping

Sound Sleeping is a great website that I just discovered. It is supposedly to help you relax and sleep but I am loving it for classroom background noise. You can pick several different sounds with background music or just the relaxing sounds themselves. I can just imagine now setting the scene at the ocean, when camping or during a thunder storm. This has me really excited!

Don't forget about my giveaway ending Wednesday!

I have a $10 Amazon gift card burning away for one lucky person. Now don't take this lightly. It could be one WHOLE non-teacher book. :)
You can enter by following my blog, posting about my giveaway or checking out my wiki and comment back here at Taking on Third.

Hope everyone is enjoying the "rush" of the season!

Me and My Gang...and don't forget about the Giveaway

  
Head on over to check out the grade level greatness happening at Me and My Gang. I am really excited to see everything that is happening!
Also, Don't forget about  my giveaway that ends this Wednesday!! Follow me, post about the giveaway or check out my wiki to enter. Make sure you come back and comment so I know who has entered! Who doesn't love some free money to spend over at Amazon.com.

Welcome...now Let's Lay Down Some Rules

So I found out today that I have to do things a little differently. At my campus we have campus wide rules so I had to change my thinking and my set up. So I created a Prezi to share on the first day of school that we can discuss. Let me know what you think.

Classroom Rules on Prezi

Don't forget about my Giveaway!!

$10 Amazon gift card!

Enter by:
1. Following my blog and leaving a comment.
2. Blogging about my giveaway and leaving a comment.
3. Checking out my wiki and leaving a comment.

3 chances to enter. You have until 9 PM on Wednesday the 17th!

EDLD 5306 Course Reflection

When entering this course, I really had no expectations of the outcome. I was unsure what the concepts of educations technology would be. After looking at the syllabus and getting a better understanding of what we would be doing, I was really excited. The ideas of making a blog and a wiki were challenging ones that I never expected but I have found that I love using them. This course also introduced some new technology such as Wordle as well as Animoto which I was already familiar with. So granted, coming in I had no idea what to expect, I am very pleased with how this course has gone. I feel that I have achieved all goals set forth in the course and am excited to continue on working with by blog which has several followers as well as working on my wiki which is also my class website and seeing what new information is out there to continue my education in become a tech teacher.

I believe that this information that I gained in the class is very relevant to the work I do at school because I am using it every day. I try to update my blog on a daily basis. I have amazing followers who leave great comments and feel that I have built a great online community to help continue that education. I also use my wiki on a daily basis. It is the base of my classroom website and allows me to store lots of information for my parents. I have added spelling words, homework assignment, videos of last year’s students, information about myself and my classroom as well as any forms or documents that they can access and print at home to work on. I think this will benefit parents immensely since they are also very active in the digital world. I am excited about what is to come so that I can apply more to make myself a better teacher.

I feel that my principal competencies and internship plan are a little lacking. I know it is because of the rush to get back to school as well as the time constraints on the last week of the course. I have been working non-stop on my classroom and preparing my lessons and feel that I have not spent as much time working on the course as I did at the beginning. There is also the time constraint with meeting my mentor teacher as she also has much to do to prepare for the new school year. I have some issues with remembering to include documentation with my replies on the discussion board as well. I tend to treat it as discussion where I would not be constantly citing someone as opposed to going out to find someone who agrees with me and them adding my comments. I am used to the discussion board since I used it every week in my undergraduate courses but I was not required to cite someone with every posting.

I believe that I was successful in carrying out the assignments. I really enjoyed reading the book for our technology review. I was afraid that it would take too much time but found that I enjoyed the book and the new ideas so much that I finished it in only two days. I also enjoyed the reading assignment but had some issues working the school library system so I ended up finding the articles online myself. That ended up being hard work on occasion since there is just so much information available out there. I did have some issues working on the internship plan simply because there was not a lot of information out there. I did try to go online to access other templates that I could use for examples. I feel that overall I was successful and hope to continue to get more great information from the other courses.

I feel that I learned a great deal from this course. As I said before I am very glad I had the opportunity to make a blog and a wiki since I am continuing to use them every day. I enjoyed reading Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. I think it really got into why these tools are important and why they appeal to so many students and educators. Along with the information, I learned that when I am really interested in a topic, I will work until it is done. I spent many hours working on my wiki to get everything to look just as I want. I enjoy how everything is laid out and organized under tabs. I really like how my students and their families will have easy access to all that is happening in the classroom any time of day. I am hopeful that I get as much great information from every class as I did from this one.

Giveaway here at Taking on Third!!

I am going to have a $10 Amazon gift card giveaway simply because summer is at an end. I am excited about my first year in third but sad that I can't sleep until 9:30 every morning. :(

Here's what you need to do....

1. Become a follower

2. Post about the giveaway on your blog and comment with the link.
3. Check out my classroom wiki @ Taking On Third

Leave a separate post for each entry and I will choose a winner Wednesday, August 17th by 9 PM central time using random.org.  Looking forward to hearing from everyone!!

Before and After Classroom Pics Linky Party

I have already been posting pics but I wanted to go ahead and link up. As you can see my classroom was pretty bad when I moved in. I know it is still pretty plain but soon the kids will have this all covered up with anchor charts and student work!

Before I covered the walls.

After I covered the walls.

Cabinets before door were removed.

Cabinets after doors were removed.

I am still kinda junky but since teachers come back to work TOMORROW!! I am going to have to get it together soon! :) Enjoy the rest of summer while you still can.