A few things on my mind for this semester:

1. YouTube – It is still blocked by our district. If you are at school most of the video’s below will not play. I am working on getting this changed, but if it does get changed it will take some time. (You can view most of the video’s at school in the Mr. Williams’ class folder on your desktop)

2. Homework Club – Homework Club will be changing. I am writing up a letter to send home to parents. I will be doing more intensive tutoring in Math. Everyone is invited (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday: 2:45 – 3:45) but you may be required to come based on your last math benchmark score. A passing grade was a 60%. If you scored below a 60% I would like you to come in at least once a week. If you scored under a 30% you need to come in at least twice a week. You will receive a letter with your score on it on Friday with your Progress Report.

3. Our Class Movie – We are still working on our class movie, but we are not able to spend as much time on it as we need to get it finished. I hope we can finish it within a month, watch it in class, and get it burned to some DVD’s that you can check out to share with your parents and family members.

4. Imbee.com“55% of all online youths age 12 – 17 use social networking websites (myspace.com, etc.). 91% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently, while 82% use the sites to stay in touch with friends they rarely see in person.” I know that a lot of you have MySpace accounts (and I know that it is against their user policy for anyone under 14 to be a member). I also hope that your parents know this. I want to make sure that you have the skills to use these Social Networking websites safely. “Imbee is the first free, secure social networking and blogging destination specifically designed for kids from ages 8 to 14. Imbee was created to provide a secure, dynamic environment where children can safely explore online social networking.” Imbee has a lot of the same features like blogs, messaging, and photo sharing. I am thinking about setting this up for at least my homeroom class just to teach more about Internet safety and so that students can work together on projects in a safe environment. I have set up a teacher account and will be sending permission letters home within the next couple of weeks. I will talk more with the other classes about Imbee if I think it is useful.

5. Meaner – Quite a few of the students from my homeroom class said that I should be meaner in the evaluations they filled out before winter break. I’ll think about this one.

6. Blog – I will try to put up more content from our class discussions here on the blog. Also, I really don’t like the color scheme of the blog, but I can’t figure out how to change it (yet).

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