Continent Studies

In October, SHE students are involved in a multi-cultural program that allows them to study people and traditions from across the globe. Fourth graders are assigned to study the continent of Asia. In Ms. James' class, students were introduced to the customs and language of South Korea. Ms. James has a friend who was born in South Korea, and was able to bring in some costumes, etc. to share with the students. Coincidentally, I had a friend who was teaching at Brighton Junior English School located in the city of Gwangju. The students at Brighton were assigned to write a letter to the students in Ms. James' class. After visiting the school website together, viewing a photo slideshow with images from South Korea and Gwangju, and examining some items that my friend had sent me as a gift the SHE students each drafted a return letter. We tied this opportunity together with Friendly Letter Writing, completing a series of mini-lessons which incorporated writing one's name in Korean, etc. At the end of the unit, the students' work was Air Mailed to the students of Brighton School, together with some information about Spring Hill Elementary and the state of West Virginia.

• Letter from young-hyun Ko (Betty)
• Letter from ga-hyun-Lee (Alicia)
• Letter from mi-ji-Park (Debbie)
  

Exploring Paint

I have always underestimated the Paint application which has come preloaded on nearly every PC with a Windows interface. In October, many of the teachers at Spring Hill Elementary were enrolled in an Adobe Photoshop course through CCBOE. Each was challenged to incorporate digital photography in their classroom instruction and to prepare a lesson plan that would outline this implementation. A fourth grade teacher, Ms. Dement had come across an idea that was posted in the October issue of Technology Times which utilized Paint for basic image manipulation. Gilda had been the one to post the idea for this project in an earlier issue of her technology newsletter. This was the perfect time to introduce the students to their unique drive space located on the SHE server. Ms. Dement and I uploaded all of the student photos to a Flickr account and tagged them so that they could be located easily during classroom instruction. Once the students pulled them down in a lower resolution and saved them to their folder on the server, we deleted the images from Flickr. Students were directed to save both the original image and the one that had been manipulated using Paint. Check out some of the results in the slideshow above!

Classroom Web Pages

An additional goal for creating an interactive classroom environment was to assist the teachers in developing a classroom web page. With the web folders already in place, the System's Operator and I came up with what we thought would be a fool-proof plan for every teacher at Spring Hill Elementary to begin creating an online classroom. The Technology Director at CCBOE asked that we use Word to create these pages. I don't know if you have ever tried to create a web page using Microsoft Word, but it is no easy task! First, I established a table format and developed a four-page template. Once distributed, the teachers could easily open the Word file to edit and make the page their own. Using a template allowed for the design to remain uniform, which is not only pleasing to the casual web surfer but also offers parents familiarity as they navigate the various classroom pages. The training for these web pages, particularly embedding hyperlinks, was challenging for some of the teachers. They hung right in there, and we made it! You can visit these pages by accessing the Classroom Pages Index located on the Spring Hill Elementary home page.

• Adobe Captivate: Adding a Table