5 + 1 First Day Suggestions!

1) Create a Game to get to know your class.  Choose from one of the many PowerPoint or Notebook templates (As a Social Studies teacher, the first day always included Current Event Jeopardy)

2) Borrow some of these ideas from 14 Interesting Ways to Get to Know Your New Class

3) Watch an inspirational video, can your class make one?



4) Download Edutopia's Back to School Guide which is packed with lots of great ideas for the start of the school year


5) What is your sentence going to be this year?  My class did this last year and posted them up on the wall as reminders of our goal for the year.

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

6) Borrow some First Day of School Notebook Lessons from the SMART Exchange.  There are lot of pre-made and ready to go files for attendance, calender and school routines.

Google Grumblings

I have been hearing some grumblings lately with most people's default search engine of choice.  "Did you know you can pay to be the #1 hit?"  "The top hits are all advertisements?" 

Here is sweet infographic that explains how google does it...


Infographic by PPC Blog  Full Version here

Another cool website is http://bingle.nu/ which allows you to search Google & Bing at the same time and view the search results side by side.  Quite interesting which ones are the same and which are different.

Google has some kick butt resources for educators.  Google Websearch: Classroom Lessons and Resources

As well, the "In Plain English" Folks explain web searching, well, plainly!


So, just know what you are using and how they gather their information.  The best you can do is go in as a discriminating consumer, this is a service and there are other search engines out there.

http://www.ask.com/
http://ca.yahoo.com/
http://duckduckgo.com/

Wikipedia's List of Search Engines