Classrooms with Blogs

While looking for teacher blogs I happened to stumble upon Mrs. Elliott site (Mrs.Elliott’s classroom/a>) which was really informative and gave me a better understanding about blogs and how they can be useful in the classroom. Mrs. Lori Elliott is a fourth grade teacher who works at Century Elementary in Nixa, Missouri. Her school Century Elementary is one of the schools in Missouri that has eMINTS classrooms. The website that she set up for her class contains a variety of things like homework, power point presentations used also in class and even blogs for the students to write in. It also has pictures and videos of the classes’ activities, so it is pretty much her classroom online. This helps the students getting use to using the computer for future usage in the classroom. It also helps the students that were sick at home get online and catch up so that they are not behind. The neatest thing about the website is where the students get to blog and write there own opinions about books or movies watch in the class. This gives the children in the classroom the opportunity to voice their opinions, as well as to express themselves.
After reading Mrs. Elliott’s webpage, I did some research on just what eMINTS is and boy did I come up with some information. EMINTS stands for Enhancing Missouri’s Instructional Networked Teachering Strategies; it is a program that is intended to give students skills in using the computer and multimedia technology for their learning process. It helps the students be able to use programs like Word, Power Point, and Excel to form useful techniques in the technology filled world we live in today. On a website that I read by Lincoln University they say that the programs goal is to inspire ,creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, and the resolve on the student’s part to ask questions and look for more than one right answer http://www.lincolnu.edu/pages/882.asp .


Mrs. Myrmel is another teacher that I came across who is a blogger but she uses her blog page a little different then Mrs. Elliot’s. Mrs. Myrmel’s posts on her blogs are about what she does in her classrooms and the lessons she has gone over. Her page is made for the parents to be able to see what their child is doing in the classroom and how to help out improving their child’s performance. The webpage also has news letters posted on it just incase the student lost their book order slip or other things like that. Mrs. Myrmel site may also be very informative to other teachers that look at in and can get ideas for their classrooms. http://jmyrmel.edublogs.org/