Named in “Top 100 Classroom Blogs”

Posted on 12/07/2010 by Mrs. Cranford

top blogs The C-O Connections has been named on the list of “Top 100 Classroom Blogs” published by Online Degrees. “My goal,” according to Alexis Brett of Online Degrees, “was to make this list a sort of ‘resource guide’ for other teachers so they would be inspired to start their own classroom blogs as well.” She goes on to say, “I wish we would have done classroom blogging when I was in elementary school!”

Our students do love it and the connections it has helped them to make beyond our small school district. Thank you for this honor and we will do our best to continue to inspire others to blog.

Count Out Three #8

Posted on 10/26/2009 by Mrs. Cranford

2288210324_280aa3069a As a part of the Blog Challenge09 #8, we were asked to complete a task called “Count Out Three”. We were to visit one of the participant’s blogs and leave a comment. Then we were to visit one of the blogs listed in their blogroll and leave a comment. The third blog visit was to come from the second’s blogroll. This quest was really rewarding.

We first visited Mrs. Yollis’ Classroom Blog a third grade class from California. There we read paragraphs written by the students about their Halloween costumes. The students are very good writers. In fact they have a badge widget that says that they won the 2009 Digital Voice Award. We also visited Mrs. Yollis’ website, which is awesome!

From her blogroll we linked to Mr. Salsich’s Class, Connecticutt. We were especially intrigued by a blog post there about a Nature Scape field trip. We are in the process of building a Nature Center on a piece of land adjacent to our intermediate school. We are excited about its completion. One of our classes just released passion butterflies into the Nature Center. The page links were very helpful and contained a lot of good information.

Our Count Three took us to a New Zealand blog called Pt England Scribes. The recordings of the students stories were well read and has given us some good ideas about story retelling.

This blog challenge took us out of our boundaries and into the world of student bloggers.

Blog Challenge09 #8

Posted on 10/26/2009 by Mrs. Cranford

kid thumbing fingers

The students at White Oak Intermediate are becoming aware of our digital footprint and how important it is for us to watch what we post online for the world to view. We have discussions prior to ever accessing the internet about internet safety and the problems that can result because of its misuse. While our classroom teachers stress these guidelines, it is our computer lab teacher that really brings meaning to the concept.

We have the best computer teacher in the world. She begins the first of every year talking to us about digital citizenship and commenting guidelines. Her name is Nina Peery, and you can find all kinds of helpful information on her technology blog, Keystrokes. After two weeks of internet safety, we review our what we have learned by playing Internet Safety Games that Mrs. Peery designed.