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May 2011 Dear Parents, Students in grades Kindergarten through Fourth Grade completed a year of technology successfully. Students practiced technology skills lessons on the [|www.learning.com]  website where they were introduced to keyboarding, developed technology vocabulary, and practiced skills needed for word processing, spread sheets, and graphics. The Student Performance Report for these skills will be sent home this week in the homework folder. Students did not receive a grade for technology, but made progress as skills were introduced and needed. Several software programs and games were used to practice skills and support classroom curriculum. Kindergarten, first and second graders played Letterbugs to develop phonemic awareness and spelling skills. They also created many illustrations in Kid Pix, a beginning graphics program. Second and third graders learned how to blog on our class blog located at [|www.classblogmeister.com]. Students typed short articles and submitted them to the teacher for approval and publishing. The blog provided an opportunity for student and teacher to collaborate on writing skills. Second grade students created a voice presentation showing the biography paper doll project. The third graders created Rainforest power point presentations. Fourth grade students focused on researching USA states, Colonial Williamsburg, and Lewis and Clark. They blogged about school activities, created voice thread presentations, and participated in a class wikispaces project. Appropriate collaboration among students and between teacher and student was emphasized on the blog and wikispaces projects. The projects can be viewed on our class wiki ( http://randolph-computer-k-4.wikispaces.com/  ). I appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with your students as we learned and practiced technology this year in the Lower School Computer Lab. Best regards, Julia Lamont Randolph School K-4 Computer Lab Teacher jlamont@randolphschool.net http://randolph-computer-k-4.wikispaces.com/