Keep Parents, Students or Staff Updated with Google Calendar

Are you looking for an easy way to keep track of events and share then with others? If so, Google Calendar might be the right tool for you. It is a personal, web based calendar that lets you keep all of your important dates visible on-line and accessible anywhere. This is a great way to share important classroom dates for field trips, tests, project due dates and more. You can also use it to check availability for others to set up a meeting or event or just keep track of your own personal dates. Whether you are communicating with parents, students or co-workers it is convenient and easy to use.

Web-based calendars are great when you work from more then one computer or when you want to share your dates with others. You can get to your calendar quickly and easily no matter what computer you are working on as well as share your calendar with anyone. Some calendars can be hard to share when the other person does not have an account set up or use the same email system.

You can also embed your Google Calendar into your classroom wiki or link it to your blog. That way, everyone can see what important dates are coming up. I have two examples below. The firs is the URL (web address) to my calendar. Once you have a calendar created you can share it with others just by giving them the website. The second is an example of a calendar embedded in a website (a wiki in this case).

Sharing the URL for your calendar:
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=tak9nku%40yahoo.com&ctz=America/New_York

Calendar embedded in a website:
http://triciakluener.wikispaces.com/Schedule

There are many other web-based calendar options out there that are also great to use. You can always do a key word search and find more calendars. To learn more about Google Calendar or to set up your own, check out:

www.google.com/calendar

First Classroom Wiki: Kudos Mrs. Kingsley!

Mrs. Kingsley (3rd grade teacher at Elda) has created the first class wiki in her building! She is hoping to showcase student work, spotlight her 'Super Star Students' and share class news with students and parents. Beth's site is a "work in progress" as any class website should be. There will always be new updates and pictures to add throughout the year. Check out her wiki and let her know what a great job she is doing! The link is below. It will also be added to the Elda school website 'Links' and 'Staff' pages soon!

http://mrskingsley-3rdgrade.wikispaces.com/

She used Wikispaces to create the site. Wikispaces is a website that provides free wiki sites to the public and free educator accounts to teachers. It is the site I use for my 'Technology, Tools and Updates' wiki and recommend it to others. There are other great wiki sites available too. It just depends on what you prefer. Check out Wikispaces to set yours up!

http://www.wikispaces.com/

Morgan will have several class wikis to share soon! We are having a training session on September 23 to get teachers up and running with their own classroom wikis. There is a lot of interest through out the building and I can't wait to get people started!

Morgan Has a New Art Blog!

Ross has a new addition to the elementary blog list! Jenna Rahrig (pictured Right: Art and Technology teacher for Morgan) has created a blog for her Art students. This is in addition to the web pages she has already created for her classes and the building website for Morgan. Jenna's goal for the Art blog is to be able to communicate with students and parents. One of her students has already posted a comment!

We now have 3 class blogs between Elda and Morgan along with 5 class web sites at Morgan, 1 at Elda and a few more on the way in both buildings! The list just keeps growing!

The links below will take you to Jenna's web creations:

http://morganartroom.blogspot.com/
http://www.rossrams.com/Morgan/art.html
http://www.rossrams.com/Morgan/tech.html
http://www.rossrams.com/Morgan/index.html

If anyone is interested in creating their very own class web page or blog let me know and I will be happy to help!