Donna+Brooks



About Me I teach Read 180 and 7th grade math at Seaman Middle School, in Topeka, KS. This will be my 17th year teaching in USD345 with 4 previous years at Rossville Grade School. I was a stay at home mom before coming to teach in the Seaman District. My husband and I live in the Seaman School District and raised our children here. We have 3 adult children who are all married, and live in the Seaman District themselves. We have 4 grandchildren that keep us active and involved. I also help coach girls track, sponsor student council, and sponsor NJHS at SMS. I enjoy teaching middle level students. I am so privileged to work at a job that I love. Everyday is different and I like variety.

__//**Wikis, Websites, & Resources **//__:

__//** Math: **//__ [|online help math] Online math website for all grade levels. [|AAA math online link] Online math games website for all grade levels. [|7th math text] 7th grade Thematics online text 7th grade math wiki This is a wiki for 7th grade classroom work.

__**// English/ Reading //**__: Book reviews/viking voices A work in progress by Seaman students! Using VoiceThread, students create online book reviews to share with others. [|wordle create] A website where you can create word collages. Like at the beginning of the year "all about me posters", or book posters, characters w / adj., [|quizlet] vocabulary study source [|study stack voc] vocabulary study source [|READ 180 wiki] A wiki link for READ 180 teachers to share.

__//** Technology **//__: [|TechnolgySeaman Projectors in Education] Technology ideas per specific grade levels.

Proffesional Learning Networks Assignment Section: Some thoughts for now: I joined twitter, thinkfinity, and READ 180 wiki.
 * Twitter: I am enjoying just looking around. It is kind of like current topics online to me like cooking, beauty, and things like that. I have not figured it out all the way yet and have not posted to it.
 * I joined thinkfinity.org. I have enjoyed this network and have posted. One thing I like about this community is it gets your brain thinking out of the box. Like I never would have thought through what I thought was a major annoying grammatical error people do when they speak. It was interesting reading all the different annoying habits. It made my mind engage and I liked that part of it.
 * I am enjoying the READ 180 site as I teach READ 180 and find this site one that I will continue to use regularly for ideas and sharing.
 * I enjoyed going to everyone's page and looking at the links they posted. I also enjoyed the Link to Ewoodman's website. Elizabeth is very knowledgeable and you can tell by her personal classroom website that she knows technology. I hope to copy / borrow some of her ideas to enhance my webpage.
 * I was able to go to the spreadsheet in googledocs and put my favorite era.
 * I am enjoying playing and searching to see what is out there. This takes along time to look into different avenues for resources.
 * Other communities that I am a part of are Weight watchers online, Facebook, and K-12 technology cadre. These are all communities that sharing takes place among members.

Overall I feel that PLNs have become a communication avenue for most people. There are so many varieties of communities that people can choose to be a part of if they have online access. Facebook is one of my favorites as I enjoy seeing peoples pictures and posts and can comment or not depending on my mood. It is a way to stay connected to people far away and from my past too that I might have lost touch with. I enjoyed this assignment as it caused me to go out and search more educational communities and some networks I might not have engaged in if not presented to me. I like the variety and the ability to be involved a lot in the network community or just a little depending on how one wants to communicate. Some of the communities are for fun and enjoyment and some are for educational purposes.

Google Tools Assignment:
The Google Docs assignment " Which era?" was fun to do and read. I think having the suggestions from Kim about how to use one of these documents were helpful. Example: Last year we at school manually passed around a meal planning sheet to all the staff members. This took a long time. It would have been a lot easier and more organized if we would have had a google docs spreadsheet that we sent around to everyone to edit and save to keep it more up to date and accurate and not have to hunt down everyone by foot. I like this idea.

I tried the blogger section. I haven't edited or written a blog yet this time around but found I had a blogger account from my masters cadre class where we all had to have a blogger account. It was a nice way to discuss and blog when everyone had an account and you could communicate this way. I didn't really know what to say right now as it was randoms that were on there right now. There was a 15 year old girl with cancer on it that I followed. She had her bucket list posted and it was neat to see that she was getting a lot of the stuff marked off. :)

I also have a google reader account I signed up for a few days ago while taking this class. I really don't understand it all yet but it was fun to read the CNN news accounts. I still need to play with it.

I did sign up for google alerts one for READ 180 and one for my name. I will watch it and see what happens. I have gotten alerts from the google alerts feed. There have been some Donna Brookses out there that aren't me but it was interesting to read about them. One was a funeral announcement and one was an author note. :) I also got alerts on READ 180 seminars and other info.

I got a new personal smart cell phone this week. I was able to figure out how to sync my email to it and that is pretty cool. I am having fun playing with it and looking through lots of apps with it also.

If I had to pick one for my class the only one at this point that might fit as far as I can tell is the Google news feed. We do current events in our READ 180 units and they could read news on disasters and other topics of interest to go along with the units.

I would like to research more on lesson plans for my math or READ 180 classes.

WEB 2.0 TOOLS ASSIGNMENT:
I enjoyed playing with glogster.com. I think kids could make a glog about their individual book they are required to read or work with a partner to make on on a class novel. This would be one they could share like a book report with the class.

I liked playing with spell with flickr. I think students could use this with the unit vocab we learn.

WEB PAGE ASSIGNMENT:
I have 4 web pages that I am responsible for editing.

1st - My Zebra Fish Team's web page: I added some color, updated the calendar for August activities.
====2nd- Student Council's web page- I added a photo album but need to find pictures to add to the album still. I had some added but the went in wrong and I could not find out how to rotate once in the album, so I had to delete and will need to find them again and rotate before I add them. I had done this but you have to save rotated on to desk top before moving them. I rotated them and saved them but not into the desk top so they went back to non rotated. I am going to add a blogger page to this site too so kids/parents can suggest ideas for us to participate in. I also added an avatar to this page as our pictures for the sponsors.====

====4th- Is my personal classroom web page. This summer I learned how to add my summer school's kids' projects to the web page so they could show their document slide shows to friends or family. I am also adding a blog page to this site so kids can discuss classroom novels. I added a link to the 7th grade text book to my page also.====