January 2008 Newsletter

Happy New Year! I hope that the new year brings you much happiness and success. I am looking forward to this year as a better year for me personally. While life is hard, I am determined to make the best of it. I appreciate all of your kind words and help. The things that you have done for my family and me mean a lot to us.
Ten Reasons why the is Internet is no Substitute for a Library This is a great article that read during Grad. school. Although it is old by today's standards, much of it is applicable to students today. I spend a portion of my day each day working to update our collection. I would really like for our collection to support your curricular needs. Please let me know if there is a resource that you would like for me to locate and purchase for our collection.

Mindomo is an online mind mapping tool. It is free, which makes it even better. It is much like the program Inspiration, that you are probably familiar with. I can see this being very useful for math classes who could create a flow chart for solving a particular type of math problem or other classes who need to follow a series of steps and make decisions. Charts can be shared, allowing others to edit them. The charts can also be posted on other web pages such as your class wiki. Mindomo generates code that you can easily copy to post your mind map. I embedded a public map at the bottom of this page for you to see. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and check it out. Use your mouse to move the map around. You can zoom in or out with the "+" or "-," or with the slider. Pretty cool. I also embedded the map here on the DMS Teacher Tech. wiki for you to look at.

Class Marker is a free online tool that allows you to administer quizzes and tests online. According to the website, the plan to add a feature that will allow you to embed a quiz into your web page (I assume that means your wiki too.) In the meantime, it still looks useful. Here how to use it (from the website): I am going to try this tool with my classes. I'll let you know how it goes. Fireworks photo from Chrislrmo's photoset: http://flickr.com/photos/chrisirmo/