Don't Forget the Falcon Way!

Eid Mubarak!

Eid Mubarak! If you were off from school today celebrating Eid al Fitr, I wish you a happy Eid and look forward to your return to school in the coming days.

In case you want to see what we did while you were out, I have posted some audio and video about Ramadan and fasting in India by Anna Hazare for you to enjoy.

Parent Letter & Student Interest Survey Due Monday, August 29, 2011

Schoology

Something I am really excited about using this year is a social networking education website called Schoology.com. It's a facebook-like website that will allow us to post information, have discussions, take quizzes and receive grades in realtime, etc. You will all be receiving an activation code to sign up for the course/period I've placed you in. Make sure than sign up so that you can start using the features that Schoology has to offer. Schoology can also interact with Google Docs, so access to and distribution of assignments with the FHHS Google site should be seemless. This is going to be a fun year of learning and growing. I'm looking forward to it and I hope that you are too.

Google Docs

Today at the FHHS Staff Retreat, we were trained on Google Docs. Starting this year, Franklin Heights will have its own Google Domain and every teacher and student will have their own Google Docs account. I was not able to share any documents with you today because my password would not work correctly. However, this is going to be the official sharing site for FHHS and we will most likely begin turning in and handing back homework through this domain at some point early in the school year. I will place a link to it on the side of the page (near the edmodo link) as soon as I can get my account straightened out.

SMART Board

This year we are fortunate enough to have received a SMART Board for room 256. I am really excited about this as I think it will open up even more interactive learning opportunities for you. I sat through the training earlier today and I must admit that I'm a little overwhelmed. Even though they only taught us the basics, there sure seemed like a lot of basics! :) Bear with me during the beginning part of this year as I learn how to better integrate the SMART Board into our lessons. I might make some mistakes in the process, but in the long run, this is going to be a very good thing for your language learning.

Rosetta Stone

So many things to be excited about heading into this school year. I just finished sitting through training on the new Rosetta Stone software. The ESL Department has made it available for us to use off the district server this year. It is outstanding!! I can't want for you to be able to use it. It will be available to students who scored 1 or 2 on the OTELA. I plan to make it half-period stations a couple of days a week. Of course, you can also come to my room during study halls and lunches to use it if I have computers available. The people who volunteered extra time last year to help me out with other classes benefited from being around the work others were doing and progressed even more quickly in their language skills. Rosetta Stone is going to be a great addition to our classroom!!

Lots of ESL Resource Links

Today was the first day this summer that I've done work for the coming school year. I planned to begin some time this week, so that's good. I got the itch to work on the blog first so it is good and solid and I'm not scrambling at the end of August.

The majority of my time was spent finding great online resources for the students to use this year. On the right side of the blog is a list of ESL websites and another list of ESL iPod apps. I hope that the students take advantage of these when they are at home, in study hall, or wherever they may access the world wide web.