Children's Books

Reading children's,books is one of my favorite things to do.  Actually, I must admit I have a huge hoarding problem! It doesn't matter if I have more than one copy, one for school and one for home....perfect! My kids do not have any ebooks or anything of the sort.  I have tried reading an ebook myself.  Did not like any part of it.  I have this fear that the love of holding a book is going to dwindle as time goes on.  What will be the new "bedtime story"?  Will we hold an Ipad and read to our babies?  I will continue to use the "old fashioned" approach in our home and classroom.  I will do my part to keep the love of holding a book in your hand alive. You should too!

Digital Footprint

Should I say sadly, or should I say I am happy that when I type in Allie McDonald in Google nothing comes up??? It wants to correct my name as Allie MacDonald, an actress in Canada.  I am happy to say that my digital footprint is a good one! I think we teach our kids how important this is on a daily basis.  We sometimes might not call it their digital footprint or students might not even understand what we are talking about.  However, on a day to day life we teach our kids how important it is to make good choices, follow rules, be safe, and to remember to be respectful.  We teach our kids about living a drug free life style.  We make sure they understand how important it is to go to college or get training for a job after high school.  We make our students read every day.  These are all those life skills that we try to pound into our student's minds so those same rules we teach them will carry over to their digital footprint.  If you make good choices and do what you are supposed to do than your digital footprint will always be clean.  I am living proof!

Devices!

     The thought of my entire class having their own device next year scares me to death.  I am sure this fear stems from my horrible OCDs. I am also not a fan of change....at...all. Change scares me.  Maybe I am old fashioned and the idea of all my students reading a book on a device just isn't normal.  I do not even do this myself.  If I want to read something I get a book.  If it is something lengthy on my computer I print it and then read.  I also worry if my students grade will regress while we are getting use to these devices.  Wondering what our expectations will be as teachers as far as using these in the classroom.  I know just using laptops from the wireless cart along is a huge headache.  They freeze, zoom themselves in, do silly things that kids cannot fix on their own.  By the time I get everyone logged on and where they need to be half the lesson time is gone.  I am sure with the older kids this is much easier.  But with my 7 and 8 year olds this sounds like a huge headache.  I guess we will see next January! I think Symbaloo will be very important to me in the near future!