igoogle

igoogle is totally fun. I was a little reluctant to create another e-mail address, but I had to anyway for my blog, so I thought what the heck. I love creating my own personal page with my interests and needs. I have not actually figured out how I am going to utilize this page for my teaching benefit, but it has some useful everyday tools. I'll keep playing and maybe I will discover some new things on igoogle that may help me as teacher.

To blog or not to blog as a teacher

Honestly, I really don't want the controversy surrounding blogging as a teacher. It is not worth it to me to risk upsetting parents or other teachers with the opinions that will be expressed on my personal blog. I would not want my blog to effect getting a teaching job or promotion. Also, I am planning on becoming an early elementary school teacher and to use blogging as an instructional tool is not really practical at that age. I can definitely see it being useful for a junior high school or high school teacher. Especially because that is how most students in that age group communicate. If I did have a blog as a teacher I would use it to share course related resources with fellow teachers, but I would not want a personal blog that is unrelated to my job. Not just because of the controversy that can surround it, but also the time it requires to keep up a blog.

Play with Pasta

I am so excited about finding this new and fun activity to do with my preschoolers tomorrow on http://www.education.com/. It's so easy I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Pasta name writing http://www.education.com/activity/article/Pata_Names_Kindergarten/. I have two children that are struggling with name writing and I think this will be an exciting and useful project that will help, but fun for all the kids. This is a great website, I love the activities section because it offers practical things that I can implement now as a preschool teacher. It is also easy to find what topics apply to your partciluar age group because it shows what grade the activity can be use for.

Furl

I can see the benefits to using Furl http://www.furl.net/, but I think I would use it more as a student doing a research paper than as a teacher. As a teacher, I would most likely collect so many items that I would not have the time to sift through it all. All the information received would just build until I have so much that I would probably get over whelmed even looking at it. However, I do like the fact that furl will help me organize and find the websites that I may want to visit again. Maybe if I started using it more on a personal level and became familiar with all its perks I would be more likely to use it in my future teaching career. As of now it looks too time consuming for my busy life.

Vlib

The virtual library website http://vlib.org/ is full of useful information for teachers. It was easy to navigate through and find the things I was looking for. If I was planning a lesson and needed information on a particular topic I could see myself using this site. I was really excited when I found the page that lists a collection of the different museums around the world. Unfortunately, many links were not working properly and I came up with several error pages.