Wikispaces for your classroom

Now that back to school day is over, keep your parents informed about what’s going on in your classes through your blog as well as a wikispaces site.

Advantages of wikispaces:

• students can be the authors of their pages while you still hold administrative power
• videos (imovies, voicethread, flip camera quicktime movies, recordings from photo booth) are all simple to upload to a wikipage
• ohana and other students can c0mment directly on voicethreads from the wikispace rather than sift through drafts of presentations on the voicethread site
• the site is as private as you want it to be
• if someone inadvertently erases some content, it’s easy to fix, as the program tracks who changed what and when
• wikispaces, unlike your school blog, can be worked on from home

Check out the wikispaces sites of some of your colleagues, and if you’re ready to add to your repertoire, I’ll be happy to help you set up a site.

Jerelyn’s grade 8 social studies

Mele’s Papa Nohona Hawai’i

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Resources for Reading

Summer is over, and now that school has started, the kids are coming home with reading homework,  but as a parent you want to make sure that they’re reading something at their level, educational and still interesting enough to keep them motivated.

If that’s a concern for you, Mrs. Crystella Kauka, our middle school librarian has a wonderful online resource for finding the “right” book for your child.

Instructions:

Go to our middle school home page and click on the banner for the Charles Reed Bishop library.

On the left column of the home page, under “Online Databases” is the link Novelist

The database can find books by type (adventure, adventure comics. . .), author, age/grade level, etc. You’ll get a short synopsis of the book and it will even list similar books so you can plan ahead.

Learn Vocabulary through Cartoons

Weboword is a website dedicated to teaching vocabulary visually.

If students are visual learners this is a great site for learning vocabulary. Not only does the site give a daily word, it also gives a visual, a sentence, a definition and information on the root of the word.

Why I like this: the more exposure students have to vocabulary, the more chances they have to learn new words. Also, by giving a visual picture, students have more ways to learn a word.