Cybertricks - Steering Clear

The Google Public Policy Blog recently added this great video about avoiding cyber-scams. Make sure you take a look at it, and watch it with your family members. It's very helpful!

Fremont Story Corps

This week we began the Fremont Story Corps project! This project is based off of the NPR StoryCorps.
It's designed to get kids thinking about how we are going to preserve the past for the future generations of Fremonters. With the advent of digital technology, we have the power to preserve our history and our heritage with the use of our voices.

I hope that you'll get a chance to check out the NPR versions for inspiration, as we get our students to engage an adult with technology. Check back for the final project!

Happy Holidays from Fremont!

The kids have been hard at work for the past few weeks creating some awesome stuff: movies, music, digital stories, Google Earth stories and even some games! We created a website to celebrate all their hard work so, please, check it out!!!

Here's the link to our website: https://sites.google.com/site/happyholidaysfromfms/

And here's the Holiday Mashup Video!



and below is the Glog front page! Happy Holidays!

Locking Safe Search with Google

I thought this was important to share with the Fremont community. If you use Google at home with students, which, most of us do, Google now allows you to "lock" safe search with your Google account. This was recently announced in the official Google blog. It makes me excited to see that the Internet is, every day, becoming a safer place for children and students to learn, explore, work, and wonder. This handy video explains it all.

Rob Parton Visits Tech Class

Today is a super day! Know why? Because Rob Parton, jazz trumpeter and Chicago jazz scholar, will be joining us in the tech room for a little music. From Rob's website:

"As a studio musician, Parton has played on hundreds of both local and national radio and television commercials and many local CD projects not only as lead trumpet but as contractor. Parton has performed with the Chicago Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Chicagoland Pops Orchestra, Doc Severinson, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra Jr., Mel Torme, Beach Boys, Christopher Cross, Sheena Easton, Peabo Bryson, Celine Dion, Nick Carter, Yolanda Adams, Josh Groban, Enrique Eglasius, Natalie Cole and Maynard Ferguson to name only a few.  Parton has traveled with Natalie Cole and most recently been a featured member of the Music Now series offered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra."

I'm happy that the folks at Metropolis Performing Arts Center in Arlington Heights were able to work with me in coaxing Rob to come out to class and talk to us about jazz and jazz history as part of our Google Earth project. I'm also hoping the kids enjoy hearing Rob play. I'm sure  the kids will love it! I'm attempting to show this live here, so check back around 11:50am!

Streaming live video by Ustream

Where's My Homework?

So your student came home and they don't remember where to find out what's due in Mr. Rezac's class.

Problem solved. They can go to my teacher page at this link. The calendar for homework is on the right. If they haven't viewed the calendar before, it will tell them to put in the Time Zone. That time zone is Central time.

The only thing most students needed to have in to me is the class Participation Contracts and the Internet Safety contracts. You can see those were due on September 2nd and 3rd in the image below.

As for other homework, in my class, we are working on ongoing projects. The calendar will reflect the due dates for elements of the projects. Not all of the work is done in class, so students will have to do that work at home. Student journal writing prompts are mostly to be done at home, not at school. So the most homework students will have is the Online Journal entries.

I haven't put all of my due dates yet into the calendar, but I'm almost there. For students that struggle with organization, I would hope this calendar would be a Godsend. The ultimate goal, I think, would to have all of their teachers use it so that students can check for due dates for all of their classes in one simple place. 

Hope this helps!

DR

Using the Firefox toolbar for search.

This week we logged in for the first time! This is probably the most frustrating time, but the kids really swept through the lesson and got into their environments. We're also learning that we have to memorize our passwords because we don't want other folks to use them.

The main them for the week was that we explored some new things with the Firefox Web browser.

Did you know that you could do a search directly in the Firefox address bar? 

Here's an example:

• instead of going to Google.com or Ask.com, simply type in the search you're trying to do right in the address bar at the very top of the page.  

• What happens?

It goes directly to the most popular page for that search item!!! This works great for historical items like:

Martin Luther King
Napoleon
Civil War
Babylon

This may also work in some versions of Internet Explorer (I haven't checked them all). But since Firefox uses Google as their top search, it will use Google's method of searching. Since wikipedia.org is the most popular place on the Internet for doing searches on historical figures this is what often comes up, so it can be a good thing (mostly) or a bad thing (sometimes). Always remember to get more than once source of course!

Anyhow that's the theme for the week. See you on the Internets!

DR