Speed Type Challenge

If you haven't tried this site yet, do it now! But be warned . . . this speed type game is not for the faint of heart. It will get your adrenaline pumping and your fingers flying. See what level you can reach. The words are not typical, so you really have to concentrate, focus, and use correct keyboarding technique to be successful.

And here's your blogging assignment for this week:

• Play the speed type game (several times)


• Get to the highest level you can reach


• Take note of the word that trips you up and makes you lose


• Look up the definition of your "losing" word


• In a comment to this blog post, provide your "losing" word, a definition, and compose a sentence using your word. Be creative!


• Use your creature identity and period # at the end of your comment


• Also, include the level you reached in the game


• Your comment post is worth 10 points

Creatively Crafting Catchy Comments

As we work our way through class this week and increase our knowledge of computer concepts, document formats, and Word features, pay close attention. By the end of the week, your blogging task will be to provide an alliteration comment about something you learned, something that inspired you, something cool, something new.

What is alliteration? It's the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of two or more words. Click on the comments below to see another example (you did notice the alliterative title, right). Then begin to craft your own alliteration to post at the end of this week. Your alliteration must contain four words with the same beginning consonant and is worth 10 points.

Remember, use the anonymous identity but provide your creature name and period # in your comment.

Blog, Write, Read, and Play Part 2

Now that we've all transformed ourselves into the likeness of some animal, bird, insect, or otherwise for this blogging project, let's pop over to Word 07 and explore the Shapes feature on the Insert ribbon.

Spend a little time playing with all the possibilities and create your creature using shapes, color, layers, rotation, and anything else you can dig into.

This is my "Bella the Queen Bee" creation.

And just to brighten up the place a bit, we will print our "shape" masterpieces and hang them around the classroom. Your creation is worth 10 points.

Birds Can Blog, Wrens Can Write, Rats Can Read

A Blog Project for Mrs. Spear’s
Keyboarding and Computer Concepts Students

Let's start with some FAQ's:

What is a blog?

• Short for web log, a blog is usually written by one person, updated pretty regularly, and can be about any subject. Readers of the blog can comment and it creates an opportunity to connect online with others.

Why are we blogging in this class?

• Blogging is a very popular use of the Internet. You can learn a lot from reading and particpating in blogs. And who knows, you might be inspired to author your own blog.

How do I safely blog?

• Never offer any personal information including your last name, contact information, home address, phone numbers, school's name, e-mail address, last names of friends or relatives, instant messaging names, age, or birth date.


• Never post provocative pictures of yourself or anyone else, and be sure any images you provide do not reveal any of the previously mentioned information. Always remember to look at the background of a picture too.


• Assume what you publish on the Web is permanent. Anyone on the Internet can easily print out a blog or save it to a computer.


• Keep blogs and comments positive and don't use them for slander or to attack others.

What's the first assignment?

• Assume the persona of a real or imagined classroom pet. Click on the comments link below and write a short description of your pet. Include the following: pet's name, male or female, description (color, size, personality, features). Use the anonymous option for your comment. But, at the end of your description include your first and last initials and period #. (example DS Period 4)

This first blog comment is worth 10 points. Please write complete, correct sentences to earn the full 10 points!

Keep following this blog each day to find out what's next in our blogging project!!

In the year twenty twenty

In the fall of 1986, I took a graduate education class entitled Major Philosophies of Education. It was a night class that met three hours once a week face-to-face, of course (no online opportunities yet). One of the requirements of the course was a group project (no wiki here) to create a school based on a philosophy of our own choosing. So our group set out to decide what our philosophy would be and how our entire school system would be structured (with pen and paper). Now as I remember correctly, my group of four was pretty forward thinking. And note that at the time, there were no personal computers, cell phones, and even video cameras were like dinosaurs. However, we came up with a philosophy called “elitism.” And the basis of our philosophy was that each student in our district would have a computer in which they were capable of connecting with their school district and teachers and subject area content and able to pretty much be virtually linked to their school 24/7. We even presented our project in video format (way before podcasting and YouTube). Pretty elite (and good foresight I must say) for 1986, huh? Fast forward to now . . . 2007. Elitism, as my 1986 educational philosophy project described, is reality. Wow, have we come a long way in 20 years.

So what will our world and education be like in 14 years from now in the year 2020? First, there will still be the elite--those that have the most up-to-the-minute technology devices and access to the coolest online tools. That reality will never change. As much as we might like to think, believe, or dream that the world and education will even itself out, that no child will be left behind, there will always be the underprivileged. When I first began teaching with computers in my classroom one of the first questions I would ask my students at the beginning of the school year was, “Who has a computer in their home?” Two or three hands would raise per class. As the years passed, those students became the minority. Now every student has at least one computer in their household.

The world will become flatter, smaller, and more connected as we reach the year 2020. Web 2.0 will continue to evolve and flourish. The masses of people, and by masses I mean people of all ages and all walks of life, will continue to add content to the World Wide Web and to learn and grow from and with each other. The Web will be alive, live, real time, no wait, 24/7 with internet connections faster, broader, and perpetually portable. There will be new terms and ways to connect, collaborate, and share, to add to wikis, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, feeds, steaming video, etc. And it will change, evolve, and grow at speeds we can’t even imagine. A good portion (if not all) of an individual’s life will be online.

But what does this mean for education? I truly don’t see education keeping pace with the speed of technological changes. At least not in the United States. The funding (and the priority) is just not there. And the federal government will provide less and less and the individual states (and local governments) will have to take up more of the burden. On the other hand, this financial impact may change the whole face of public education. We may see many more privatized schools or maybe we will see the merger of local school districts for the sake of financial security. Technology totally set aside, money is definitely a big issue for the future of education.

I’m always an optimist, and definitely am when I think of the future of education, but I do believe that problems we face now, today, in our schools will never be resolved. As new technologies emerge, new problems will always follow. The teachers coming out of college today will be in the education system for the next 30 years. And although these new teachers are entering their classrooms with more technology training than say ten years ago, we still deal with the problem of retraining and good solid professional development as new technology methodologies emerge. So again, technology grows and changes at a very fast pace, but our educational systems lag.

With technology, teaching (and really most occupations) will become a lifestyle rather than a job. People will always be connected, which makes it hard to separate career from personal life. I’ve always felt that teaching has never been a 7 to 3 job. From September to May, teachers immerse themselves in their classrooms and the job never stops. Some of my best lesson ideas have come to me in the middle of the night! With the “World Live Web” and connectivity, I see teaching in the year 2020 as a never-ending constant. In the future, students to students, teachers to students, and teachers to teachers will be ever-connected . . . sharing, collaborating, and doing so in real-time all the time.

Pack your back and take it with you!

Do you carry a backpack? Does it have lots of your life stuff in it? Would you like to convert all that important stuff to a digitally organized, always available, and less heavy format? Then check out backpackit.com. The New York Times, Business Week, PC World and more have really good things to say about it. With over 300,000 people using the site, you can keep your to-do lists, notes, ideas, and calendar online with backpackit. And you can keep it private or share. It’s up to you. The uses of the site are literally endless. But specifically for students this site would be great for

• notetaking
• homework, exam, and project reminders
• compiling resources
• posting club or organization information
• your school and work schedules
• posting your favorites pictures
• keeping track of all your favorites in one spot

You’ll start with a homepage and then add more pages as needed. You can set up lists, notes, and add a writeboard which has RSS capabilities. Save your favorites, keep a calendar, and be totally organized all in one spot. Here’s my backpack example.

Save a tree—practice a paperless classroom

Each school year, I choose a theme for my classroom. It’s usually a general or specific way in which I hope to make a positive change for my school year. One year I hung a large yellow smiley face in the back of my classroom and deemed the year “smile til it hurts.” Another year I decided to be “comfortably numb”—to not allow any bureaucratic educational red-tape paperwork bother me. This year, I began with a vow to eliminate paper usage in my classroom. Now for me, this is a pretty easy task. I teach in a classroom equipped with awesome computers and have a website that I post all lesson plans, assignments, announcements. My students also have access to a dropbox for handing in assignments electronically. And this is the year that I began to facilitate our high school’s first online class using Moodle which eliminates all need for paper. Every activity, assignment, quiz, and wiki is posted electronically and then graded complete with feedback through the site. So I’m good. But I’m also working on those around me. It really irritates me when a whole sheet of paper is used for something that could have been easily formatted on a half sheet thereby cutting down on paper usage by half, but also requiring that someone use a paper cutter. And I’m bugged by memos that come via email and then also on paper copy. Why? And teacher’s who copy mounds and mounds of handouts. Couldn’t at least some of these be distributed electronically? It just takes a little time and creativity. This paperless theme is one that will take me through the rest of my teaching days. It puts more responsibility on the students . . . good thing. It makes learning more fun and interactive for the students . . . good thing. It requires that students network both among themselves and with their teachers . . . good thing. It saves trees . . . awesome concept!