Category: Administrative Stuff

New Wiki

Morning signCreative Commons License Artur Rydzewski via Compfight

Sunrise or Sunset?  Glass Half Empty or Half Full?  Same information, yet different opinions as to what is going on.

In February I found out that Wikispaces was shutting down for good this year.  As a free user, I had until the end of May to migrate many years, over 10, of student information to a new Internet space.  If I did nothing, all of that information would disappear forever.  Student projects would disappear, student notes and resources would be be gone, years of work from many people would just evaporate into nothing.

At first I was devastated, Wikispaces was my first online presence and online class workspace.  From a nostalgic perspective I was losing a part of my history, from a practical standpoint I was losing a major tool out of my repertoire with days if not months of work ahead to try and salvage as much information as I possibly could.

As time has passed, I realized that this entire situation can be considered a new beginning with the potential to really expand my knowledge base.  This brings about short and long term goals that I must meet or lose a lot of information and history.

In the short term, I re-examined PBwiki, I remembered this sight from my first experience building an online presence.  This site was passed over for Wikispaces when I  first started this journey, oh the irony…right?  Well, I jumped back into it and started building  a new site, combining my student note wiki with my student project wiki.  PBwiki limits the number of sites one can use per email address, so combining the two was a necessity.

The wiki I used for my professional development presentations and educational resources can be found here, at least until the end of May.  It is being migrated to a separate PBwiki. I kept this as a separate wiki because I do not know how the storage limits will affect my information yet.

The long play is that I am playing around with Weebly and Google Sites as possible support or complimentary resources for my work.  There is always the possibility to expand my main web presence, mrsalvucci.com into a larger project.  For now these are just thoughts, with the main work focusing on saving the past and migrating a plethora of information to PBwiki.

 

Parent Participation with Student Blogs

Journal arbyreed via Compfight

Hello everyone, I hope all is well this wintery flu season.  I sent out the Cel.ly to direct you to this site and hopefully show off the students’ blogs.  The students are doing all sorts of great work and publishing their projects to the Internet.  I wanted you to see their work and I am not sure they have showed you their blogs as of yet.  I know I am risking their wrath for encouraging you to do this, but so be it…they deserve to have people view their work and see the effort they put forth.  We will be doing more writing on these blogs as the year goes on, please stop back after today and check out their continued endeavors.

Feel free check out their blogs by clicking on the link to the left labeled Individual Student Blogs 20017 2018 by clicking here.  Once you are on the page, click on one of the images based upon your student’s class period and scroll through the list of blogs.

Please read their work and feel free to leave a comment.  All comments need to be approved before they become publicly viewable, I am not worried about parents replying to blogs, but you never know who may stumble across them on the Internet, so we have to approve all comments.

You can also check out their other projects which are located on the Student Project Wiki.  Click on the “Definitive Destination Guide” and peruse the work of New Brighton High School’s students.  Publishing their work to the Internet is great, but it is even greater when you check it out.

Enrichment Opportunities 2017 2018 School Year

Students have been asking “Can I do extra credit?”  My response is always, “There are plenty of enrichment assignments you can attempt for enrichment points.”  What’s the difference?  Extra Credit is usually points just added on top of a students grade for whatever reason.  Enrichment Points are points added to a grade for completing an extra assignment, but they are averaged in as an extra test, quiz, or project, not just added on top of the existing grade.  They definitely help out, but not as much as just piling on points to the existing grade.

So what sort of projects to we have for enrichment?  I will keep the complete list on my website, mrsalvucci.com, they will be posted as their own page: Enrichment Assignments.  But for now, here is a quick list of projects students can explore for enrichment:

  • Working in some way shape or form on the class Internet Talk Show, “Wake Up New Brighton”
    • We can use people on camera and behind the scenes to help showcase events and cool things about our school and community.
  • Creating a StoryCorps project about someone or something in the community.
  • Using the Livescribe Pen to take notes or create a pencast for your classmates.
  • Creating a review podcast to help your classmates with course materials.
  • Guest blogging on the class blog about a course of study topic or something you find interesting within the school or community at large.
  • Updating the class wiki to assist classmates with course information and notes.

The goal is to get students PUBLISHING and CONTRIBUTING to the Internet.  I hope to get them to become creators of positive and appropriate information and media.  To be aware of appropriate behaviors online in educational and general settings; where these habits can carry over into everyday social media experiences.  The students should have a positive digital footprint, one that they and their families can be proud of and use as a reference throughout their educational and professional careers.  The enrichment activities listed here are an attempt to move the students closer to those goals.

If you have any questions about this post or the enrichment activities, please feel free to contact me at my school email.

Welcome 2008/2009 Student Bloggers

Hello everyone. Some of you have asked about the blogging opportunities in class and what it entails. For now the blog is extra credit, thus optional for you to particpate in. Posts do not need to be long and drawn out, short and to the point will suffice.

Requirements are as follows: edit your work and take pride in your writing, anyone on the Internet can view your creation; do not write inappropriate posts, they will be deleted and you will lose your privileges; and finally, enjoy the project!

Open letter to my students about getting started

Hello everyone. This is the site we will be using for blogging. Class discussions have been good, so this is the next step…putting your thoughts out for a larger number of people to see. I appreciate you volunteering for this project. There are no wrong opinions if you base them on facts. Always support your ideas with examples, people may disagree with you, but they can never prove you wrong. The facts are your allies. Remember that anyone in the world can read what you right, so proofread your work. More importantly, be yourselves, you have great ideas and you express them well. This is your forum, I hope you enjoy the experience and learn something from it.

Sincerely,

Mr. Sal