Here’s to new beginnings…..

With the new school year fast approaching, there have been TON of changes in my professional life over the summer holidays. The first that is obvious to all my readers is that I have switched to EduBlogs. This comes about after having issues with my school and Blogger. Also, the biggest change that I have had this summer break is that I have moved schools. I have left Noel Elementary (Missouri) and I’m now teaching at Woodland Jr. High (Fayetteville, Arkansas). With these two changes one can imagine the excitement and the nervousness that I’m currently feeling, but I’m glad to say that the excitement vastly outweighs the latter……so let’s get started!

One thing I would like to accomplish in this post is to introduce a few new features that I will be using this school year. After Mr. C’s Blog about continually improving, and I felt inspired to share some changes that are taking place in my classroom. The first and the most dramatic change that I will be implementing this year will be the use of a new social network page. Instead of using my usual Ning Network from last year, I will be using a Grou.ps to host the social network of the 8th Grade at Woodland Jr. High (screen shot above). Grou.ps will allow my students to host  blogs, wikis, discussion boards, groups and multimedia all from the same location. I’m really looking forward to the added features and the new possibilities this will open up for myself and my students to collaborate with other classrooms. I would also like take this opportunity to invite teachers, parents and students to join our grou.ps page. If you are a teacher or parent, I would like to invite you to join our ‘Groupies’ page.

Of course another big change will be the new class blog, since it is hosted on EduBlogs the layout and format will be different, but the content will remain the same. This  year I will be teaching science, in addition to Arkansas History and Physical Education, so I will continue to post lab experiments and more…..with these variety of subjects, there should be NO REASON for writers block this year. All of the same content and resources from the previous blog are present here but they are now categorized by pages that are located above the header.

I’m very excited about improving my technology and features in my classroom and would like to ask one favor of everyone visiting today…..PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD. With this being a new location for me I realize that it will be difficult to spread the word to all of my audience from my Blogger address. Room updates coming soon!

Mr. McClung