Gaggle

I am so excited about the great opportunity our students now have to use a program called Gaggle. This is a great thing for our kids and a big help in meeting the state standards for technology. We hear a lot about state standards in math, reading, writing, science and social studies but we often forget about the standards in technology. I was talking to a fellow teacher recently who remembers when computers first came about and how many people thought they were just a passing fad. Obviously those people were way wrong as technology is now becoming so ingrained in our lives most of us could not function without it. For our kids, this is going to be even more a fact of their lives. It is very important that they are comfortable with technology in every way.

Gaggle is a great opportunity for our students to become familiar with email, blogs, message boards and chat rooms in a safe enviornment. It is highly monitored and anything inappropriate is sent to adminstrators. We are then able to block that content from the kids. We will be using Gaggle to do the Geography Homework so that the kids can practice downloading and uploading attachments as well as word processing skills. There are still a few kinks to work out with the attaching process. If for some reason, Gaggle won't let the student attach and gives an error message, let us know what that is so we can work on it on our end. I have asked the students to also save the file to their digital lockers as a back up.

Several of the students have set up blogs but they are only viewable at this point by other members of our school. I have also set up a message board that the students are supposed to be responding to.

This is a great opportunity for our students as well as something many of them find to be fun. Thank you as parents for your help as we embrace the future with these students.