Friendly, Free, Useful, and Safe

Friendly:

To celebrate X-Mas and reading, the SSR Committee organized a school-wide X-Mas SSR period. Two teachers and an alumnus read X-Mas stories to students while teacher elves served hot chocolate and cookies. It was a pleasant social gathering.

Free and Useful:

The world of google is bigger and more diverse than you think. And many of its free services benefit educators and students. The following list exposes you to google applications (google apps) that permit myriad teaching tools for the classroom. Caution: These teaching tools are for those educators not steeped in traditional modes of teaching but for those willing to adopt constructivist, collaborative, project-based teaching models; that is, teaching tools that prepare students for the 21st century of work. Please visit:

http://services.google.com/apps/resources/overviews_breeze/Apps/index.html

http://www.google.com/support/a/users/

http://www.google.com/educators/activities.html

More free and useful: The follwing wiki services aid poor readers and provide the educator with free textbooks documents for research. Worth a look!

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page = free textbooks and manuals

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page = free source documents, books, speeches, etc...

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wikipedia = for students learning english or have a difficult time reading. Check it out!

Safe: This week at Chapel, Internet Safety was preached. After a 'Don't Eat the Yellow Snow' analogy, the message conveyed was to 'minimize the risk' in the cyber-world. Since students will explore the good and the bad of the internet - and be risk-takers, it is imperative that they are taught to be responsible interent users. So educating them about the dangers of the internet, instilling safety messages and mantras, and convincing them to take a pledge to be a safe internet user will guide our internet safety curriculum.