At McKitrick School we have decided to make November Parents Month with regard to after school activities.  A number of opportunities are available for Parents including Cooking, Health and Beauty Tips, North Star Hockey games, Crafts, and Computers.  Parents are invited to attend and child care will be provided for their children.

On the computer nights parents started by learning a little about the system in place at our school.  They also had an opportunity to discover the world of the internet and how to use Internet Explorer.  We finished off the evening by discussing internet safety as it relates to their children.  At our second session we got into the use of email.  All parents in attendance created their own email account with live.ca and managed to send and receive a few messages.  Many of the parents were able to send messages to their children, which created quite a bit of excitement.  The third session will focus on digital photography and photo sharing.  Parents will have an opportunity to take and upload digital photographs and upload these to accounts they create on flickr.  Time permitting we will also look at some basic photo editing.  The topic of the final session is yet to be considered although we are considering digital citizenship and using the computer for school work.

So far our experience with parents in all activities has been quite successful.  I am hopeful that we can continue to offer computer access to our parents after the formal sessions are complete.  We also hope to donate some used computers to those parents who participated and other families in our school that do not currently have a computer at home.

First look at Zamzar

I am still having some difficulty keeping track of and organizing passwords and usernames. I suppose it will come with time. I am concerned that this would certainly be an issue with students as well.

Tried using the Zamzar file conversion site today and found that it worked quite well in my initial and very limited experience. Will have to do some more testing to see if it is as good as it seems at first. I am not sure I see any learning application in the classroom at this point but it certainly could be useful for teachers and students as a utility.

My First Time!

For creating a blog, of course!