Nik Peachey's Resources

The word post Using Word Skills is good for intermediate grades. A teacher can enter text. The site will generate a word cloud based on the frequency of the words. Students can make predictions, summarize, compare, or practice sentence structure.

Make Your EFL/ESL Yearbook is a great site for making a yearbook. The class can play with this by making a yearbook for their current year or a different year (1950-2000s). Individual pictures can be uploaded, and the image is then downloaded in a jpg file. Students can write information about themselves and play clips of music.

A Picture's Worth is an interesting post. There are pictures with essays on this site. A teacher could make a website for the class to display pictures and essays or summaries. Students could also read pictures and essays on the website, and then write a summary. On this website, all pictures and essays must be submitted to the editor/site owner for approval.

The Best Website to Practice Speaking English

The website The Best Website to Practice Speaking English offers eleven links for students to practice English. This website was found on Larry Ferlazzo's blog.

Classroom Mangement

This website When a "GOOD" class goes "BAD" lists 10 actions to take in order to turn a class back to a community of learners. This website was found on Larry Ferlazzo's blog.

Best Books for Teaching ESL

On the website "The Best Books for Teaching and Learning ESL" , Larry Ferlazzo writes his opinions about books that are helpful for teaching social studies and language arts to ESL students.

Meaning of Web 2.0

I learned the meaning of Web 2.0 for this web post . I liked how the writer challenged teachers to expand their internet vocabulary, write on the web, and create a blog. Teachers were also asked to allow students to share their favorite web sites. This is an opportunity teachers to learn from the students' selection and ask questions.

Teaching Blogging to Students

This blog post titled Thinking about Teaching Blogging to your Kids? was good to read because it allowed me to see some of issues faced by another teacher who wanted to teach Blogging to her students. I already knew that Blogging might be a tough sell to administrators and colleagues. Students of 2009 are so savvy with today's technology. I thought it was funny when the teacher stated that this concept required "hand-holding." I liked how she taught the students to Blog by adding on one new concept at a time.

20 Good Reasons for Students to Blog

I though the article about the 20 reasons why students should Blog was excellent . I especially liked that students can create digital portfolios and the work can be stored permanently. This blog post is also great for convincing colleagues to get on board with "BLOGGING."

Shift Happens

The video Did you know? provided amazing information. Technology has truly evolved over the past 5-10 years. Our job as educators is to understand and implement current technology in our curriculum in order to prepare students for future technology.

Reaction to Blog

I connected to the blog "B2-A Classroom of 6-7 Year Olds." I really liked the "Digital Christmas Stories." The children wrote a story book, and each page had a picture. A viewer can also listen to the children read their story. This is perfect for developing phrasing and fluency.

Computer Accessibility

A computer lab is available to staff and students. I was also assigned a laptop computer, but I haven't been able to use it at home.

I think that blogs can be extremely valuable to classroom teachers. They can allow teachers to post homework or classwork for students who are absent. Teachers can also use the blog to post other information that is pertinent to the class.