Week 1: Improve Productivity

I am a third grade teacher and some of the tasks I would like to improve productivity in my classroom are:


1. Emailing parents/students: I would like to have more frequent communication with my student's parents and students. Most households nowadays own a computer at home with internet, so instead of sending out letters and wasting paper emails seem to be the best choice. Knowing how to create mass emails that will be sent to parents for weekly reminders would be very productive. I have sent emails to more than one person before, but if there is a program that will save time I would like to learn how to use it.


2. Saving files: One of the things my school lacks is having more than one computer in the classroom. The only time my students have the opportunity to use a computer is once a week and for 45 minutes. I like to use the computers so that my students can practice their word processing skills and doing research projects. However, being that my students are in an Elementary school they do not have their own personal folders where they can save their files. I would like to learn of an easy way to be able to save files maybe like Google documents for my students.


3. Kid-Friendly Research Websites: In my classroom my students enjoy doing research projects for Science and Social Studies. However, many times my students have difficulty finding useful websites that will make their research more productive. I would like to learn of popular, useful websites that make research simple and fun for elementary students. I have tried Webquests before and would like to do something similar to that.


4. Smart Notebook Lessons: Recently I started using Smart Notebook for many of my lesson. I would like to learn of websites that teachers can use to share Smart Notebook lessons.