Updates!

Happy weekend blogging friends! I wanted to post a few updated pics of my rooms coming together. I am obsessed with Pic Monkey which is a photo editing site and a collage maker! You can edit a single photo and add all kinds of effects, text, boarder, etc. OR make a collage of several pictures and do the same! I have used it several times to post a summer adventure day on Facebook to limit all my picture uploads :)! It is super user-friendly and easy to use.

While cleaning out my "dump" room that has accumulated everything for the past year I found this awesome collage frame but I don't have anywhere for it in my house sooo I made it into an All About Me collage for my room! There are three actual photos, one of my husband and I on our wedding day, one of us with our family and one of the girls; Lilly and Gremmy! I used Photo Collage Maker for one of the frames and put several of my favorite pictures into a little collage. One of the frames is a wordle that describes myself and the other is my school logo! The last slot is a QR code that links to a little biography about me!

I had intended on putting my centers on one large ribbon but found these five frames when I found the other one and decided put them to use for my computer lab centers. This year I plan to run centers in the computer lab which is something new. I think it will work brilliantly and really allow me and the co-teacher to work with small groups, differentiate instruction and student choice. I will have 4 technology centers; computers obviously, iPads, iPods and the SMART Board. I used clothespins and the numbers 1-30 for easy center assignment. Each student receives a class number at the beginning of the year which they will use when they come to the computer lab. I haven't totally figured out the logistics but I hope to run them for a month, switching each week but focused around ONE huge unit per grade level with curriculum integrations.

The Mrs. Jones sign was made out of an old keyboard! I cannot find the pin I had saved for this project but I am so happy with the way it came out! It looks great hanging outside of my door. Lilly and Gremmy were up late that night in the office working with me to get this done! They were NOT happy to be laying on the floor and not in their bed which is why they are sitting by the door pouting.

The sign on the door that you cannot see very well spells out COMPUTER LAB which is an acrostic poem showcasing lab expectations. I am happy to send the file if anyone is interested, just leave a comment. It begins with C- come with clean hands, O- operate equiptment responsibly, M- make sure you are listening for directions, P-push in your chair before you leave, U- use your STAR QUALITIES, T-try your best, etc. etc. etc. It also matches my polka dot theme!

My mom came to help me on Wednesday! She is amazing, always supportive and one of my best friends. We always have a blast together anc crack up laughing. She had a great time hanging boarder and cutting out QR codes for the boarder. I couldn't find any cute technololgy boarder so of course I made my own! I made QR codes that link to all of the school technology sites as well as the schools main page. I printed them on colorful cardstock, laminated them and my mom and some other worker bees cut them out. I used the blue sticky tack to stick them on the white boarder (which is actually boarder that is backwards)!

The bottom picture you can see the poms hanging from the ceiling. They were $1.27 in the Walmart party aisle! I thought they added a nice pop of color to help brighten the room up since there are no windows. I am also trying to use really bright colors in addition to the yellow which looks great with black. In the far background of the bottom picture you can see my Technology Academic Vocabulary or ABC wall. I created my own Tech ABCs inspired from Tech Teachers and plan to have the students add all of the different things that we do and words that we use in the lab to this board. What an awesome resource to quickly look at and see ALL the technology tools they can use. I am happy to share this file as well if you are interested!!!

The bulletin board in the middle is in the front of my room! I am going to call it Technology in Action and have pictures of students USING technology throughout the building. I absoutely LOVE taking pictures and have had a Shutterfly site every year for my class. Since I won't have just one class this year I thought it would be fun to have pictures up in the room and also have a Shutterfly site posted to the computer lab page for parents and students to view :)! I used PicMonkey again to put these photo collages together. One has a great quote on it, "If we teach today as we taught yesterday we rob our children of tomorrow." The other two have different technology words and applications that are being used.

That's all for now friends!