Welcome to a new school year and to our new class blog! We are a class of fifth grade students in Arizona. We’ll be telling you more about ourselves and our school as we write this blog.

This is the view outside our classroom

We started school last Tuesday, August 9. It has been very hot outside, but inside we kept cool as we explored the new technology we’ll be using in our class this year. On Tuesday we tried out our brand-new netbook cart. It’s a good thing the cart holds 32 netbooks, because there are 31 students in our class! We looked at some other class blogs and websites and planned what we’d like ours to include. We also used our new Smartboard to play an online Jeopardy game.

On Wednesday we learned how to use an iPod touch. We’re lucky to have eight iPods which we’ll take turns using this year. We explored a few of the educational songs and apps on the iPods; it looks like Stack the States is going to be a class favorite!

On Thursday we used the Smartboard to look at posts on several different class blogs. We paid special attention to the comments sections and we started a conversation about what makes a good comment. We noticed that the best comments were polite, thoughtful, and used proper spelling and grammar. Blogging is a new experience for all of us this year, so it’s a good thing there are so many great class blogs out there to teach us more about it! We will start writing our own comments next week.

On Friday we brainstormed what to write about in our first blog post. We talked about all the new things we learned and did this week. Some people wanted to write about the activities and games we played in class, and some wanted to talk about our new choices in the school cafeteria. After a vote, we decided to focus on the technology we used this week.

At the end of the day on Friday we filled out a survey on the netbooks. One of the questions was: “What are three words that describe your first week of fifth grade?” Mrs. Hamman took all of the responses and pasted them into a Wordle. A Wordle creates a “word cloud” from text, with the words used the most often appearing largest. Here is our first week of school Wordle:

It looks like our most commonly used word to describe our first week was “fun”!

What was your favorite thing about our first week of school?

What kinds of technology help you to learn?