Life Made Easier!

That's right, I have a technology tool to make your life easier!  Last week in class I introduced the students to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and personal pages in igoogle and My Yahoo!  RSS feeds are great because rather than having to go out onto the web to find news headlines and recent blog entries, they bring all you want right to you! Watch "RSS Feeds in Plain English" below to get a better idea.

After we learned about what RSS feeds can do for us, we had to learn where to "hook" them up to.  I showed students how igoogle and My Yahoo! pages allow you to customize your homepage and can have RSS feeds show up. So, every time you log on to the internet, you could have everything you want to know from CNN news to ESPN to the 8th grade social studies blog, right in front of you!  Ask your student to show you what we explored.

Google Reader is another option for organizing RSS feeds. I am not real familiar with it, but the video below can explain it some more.




 I did express to students that any sites they did not have accounts for needed to be discussed with parents or guardians first.   For internet safety's sake, parents and guardians should always know what accounts their student has out on the internet.

Higher Education

It has been an exciting week already, and it is only Tuesday! After today almost all of the students will have been on a college campus. Students visited UW-Oshkosh and Lawrence University in Appleton and heard a presentation from representatives from Fox Valley Technical College. These trips and presentations have really given the students something to think about. We also watched a video on living on minimum wage and made our first "budget".

All of this information will be used to help them determine what career to choose when making their career movie to share later in the year.

We learned about a website http://collegeboard.com that allows you to research colleges and universities around the nation. It has information on admissions, cost, educatioanl support, athletics and much more. Check it out with your student!

Population Pyramids

We have begun our work with the graphs called population pyramids. These graphs divide a population by age and gender to show the make up of a population. Students made one of the world's population. Our next steps are to write thinking questions using the world's population pyramid. Ask to see your students pyramid and questions!

If you'd like to look at some pyramids yourself visit this site:

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/informationGateway.php