Mrs. Windham's Cyber Classroom

    

Mrs. Windham

 

FOR ASSISTANCE OUTSIDE OF THIS SCHEDULE:  EMAIL ME – twindham@nppsd.org

This website has been established as a communications tool between myself, my students, and their parents.  All other visitors are of course welcome. 

I am looking forward to a great year and will use this site to keep you all informed of what is going on in our classroom.  Unit Activity Sheets, weekly lesson plans, special activities and projects, and links to a variety of resources will be available.  It should be a great year.

All parents and students will have the ability to login in to our Infinte Campus Parent/Student Portal to check grades and progress.  Parents, if you don’t already have login information, please contact us to gain access.  This is a valuable tool to keep you and your student informed.  No grade sheets will be sent home.

Additionally, 8-Gold science students and their parents will receive a Gaggle account through my classroom.  This account will provide email addresses, blogs, message boards, and chat rooms all in a secure online environment.  We will be using Gaggle, this blog site, our team website, and our PBWiki site extensively.  Students will be expected to maintain an online journal, create projects using a variety of tools, and submit work through these sites.  These online technologies will be accessible from home and when used in conjunction with other technologies will provide students with many learning tools. Specifically, many of the lectures and readings will be recorded and uploaded to these sights for students to listen to (or view in some cases).  We will spend several days at the beginning of the year in the lab becoming familar with the technologies.

Our curriculum has not changed, however the implementation of it will be a little different in my classroom this year.  In an attempt to teach to all student learning styles a layered curriculum will be put into place.  Students will have some required assignments and some choice in assignments.  Students will have the ability to chose between several types of activities at each level to meet their individual needs.  Along with this approach, I will be doing as much “oral” testing as possible.  This means they will sometimes be “tested” through an interview with me instead of a pencil-paper assessment.  However, we do have several state assessments that we must complete.

With that in mind, it is important to remember that each student is responsible for their own learning.  I can provide all the information, support, guidance, instruction, materials, and so forth.  However, the student MUST be responsible and want to succeed. 

 

SCIENCE ROCKS!