Good Morning! I am Darlene Young and I teach English 7 at Canton Jr./Sr. High School.  I found yesterday to be informative and stressful.  I enjoyed using del.icio.us as a group and found that to be easy to use.  I created a few tags that I can use in my classroom.  This site is very user friendly and did not cause me any pain.  I was unable to open my own google account and still had trouble with it today.  I finally was able to open it under my e-mail address at home.  Pbwiki was very easy to use also.  I could use this in my own classroom with various projects that my students could do.  I like this because you decide who has access to the pages and can remove people as you see fit.  It could be used for collaboration between groups of students or the whole class.  It is user friendly, and therefore an excellent tool for students to learn.  We worked on spreadsheets which was very confusing and frustrating.  I still did not feel confident using it at the end of the day.  I do use spreadsheets at school to record my grades, but it is already made and all I have to do is put in the information.  In time, with practice I am sure that I will become more confident in using them.  In the afternoon, we went to publisher and I made a page that I could use at school.  This was much easier because I have used this program before with my students.  I changed the font, picture, and moved things around.  Today, I saved my poster as a pdf. file so that I can open it on any computer.  I learned to go to file, print, change the printer to flashpaper and hit okay and save under pdf.file.  This is a useful tool because not all computers have publisher on them.   We worked on adding graphics, resizing, cropping, and inserting them.  This will make what I put on the smartboard and hand out more appealing and interesting.  Today we looked at inspiration and how to sort e-mail and make up new rules for incoming mail.  I will use this to organize all the mail that I receive on a daily basis. 

Darlene Y 440s08

How I use my smart board..............

  Bell Ringers, edit paragraphs of student work, show videos from Unitedstreaming, student presentations, and for review of material.

How I will use or would like to use my smart board................

   All of the above and now I know how to add pictures to make my presentations more appealing and will make posters, pamphlets, and brochures of my own as demonstrations for my students.  I will use google documents and have students that do not have Microsoft Word on their computer at home use this program to complete written assignments.  PBWiki.com is another program I will use to put my students into different groups and have them work on various projects. This way I will know that every group member is working on the project together because I will be able to check the history to see how often they were on.   

Orientation.pdf