Grab a Partner By The Hand

When researching a partner for our school that we did not already have, I tried to explore somewhat outside the box.  Our school has several great partners.  Some of these partners include:  Publix, Chick-fil-A, Great Harvest Bread Company, Top Dog Gymnastics, and many more. I wanted to look beyond the restaurants and grocery stores and try to find something different.  I wanted to find something that was really neat that the kids would get excited about.  I also tried to think about proximity to the school, and that's when it came to me....Lockheed Martin.  For as long as I can remember my Dad worked at Lockheed.  I loved the family days when we could go and tour the planes and bring home gigantic posters.  I thought I was the coolest kid in 3rd grade when he brought some of the memorabilia to school on career day.  What kid doesn't like air planes and space.  That's where my idea came from and the research went on from there.  Lockheed has a program called "Engineers in the Classroom" where professionals come to share about air, space, weather, technology,and much more.  Their goal is to get involved in clubs that encourage learning in science, math, engineering, and technology to get kids excited about those fields of education for future jobs.  I was surprised by what I found and definitely want to look in to learning more about this potential partnership.

Learning about grants provided me with all kinds of new information that I had never thought of before.  I couldn't believe all the grants available.  There were tons!  The only problem was weeding through them to try to find the one that would be a good fit for my needs.  Learning more about grants and looking in to how they are written and/or applied for was very interesting.  I will be following up on these sites to see which ones would work best for my school.

Internet Security

Is it bad to say I was floored by the information about movie watching, logging out when we leave the classroom computers unattended, copying of practice books, and copying of images to use on my blog? I could be guilty of all of those things, but I'm not admitting anything.  I'm just saying I could be guilty.  I'm also saying that I know several other teachers who are guilty of the same thing.  I'll have to advise others because I know they are unaware.

I can certainly see how cyber bullying is going on with today's technology of texting and social networking.  I am glad that I have not had to deal with it because of being an elementary school teacher in the lower grades.  Our school is initiating the Olweus Program which is an anti-bullying program.  We were in a training all day on Tuesday talking about the places bullying is a problem at our school.  We did not spend a huge amount of time on cyber bullying, but I'm realizing more and more how serious it is and how terrible a feeling to know that some kids can't even go home to excape/block out the bullying (like they were able to before). 

Copyright laws are a huge deal with the internet.  As I mentioned in my power point, most information as soon as it is written and posted on the web is considered copyrighted information.  I think the tools available to teachers where they can enter a student's paper into a database and compare it to thousands of other papers and internet sites to see if the info has been plagiarized are pretty amazing.  What will they think of next?  :)