Friday, May 24, 2013

Writing Rocks! Hits the Publishing World!

Our 4th and 5th grade writing club hit a new high yesterday as we published our works on Smashwords. Most of the writing, revising, editing, and basic formatting was done by none other than our amazing kiddos! I'm so proud of them!



Posted by: Mrs. Isaacs

Monday, May 20, 2013

How to Create Your Own Blog!

Hello my Neipchens! 
Mrs. Isaacs here, and I wanted to explain how to make your own blog. We can work on the blogs at school, but, unfortunately, the firewall won't let me create blogs, and so below you'll find step-by-step instructions on making your blog. 

If you are still confused and need help, bring me your email address and password. I'll take it home, and create a default blog and then we can work on the design of it at school. If you create a blog at home, please make sure that you know your URL, email address, and password so you can get on it at school to change things around. I'm working on a scroll widget with all of your blogs, so we must have a grab button for everyone and all the blogs set up before summer starts! :-)

How to create your own blog:
Make a gmail email address. 
Click on the "Create a Blog" button on the top right corner of this blog. There you will be taken to 
a page that looks like this:

That will take you to a page that looks like this:
  
The final step creates the blog. Remember, we need your URL, your email address and password in order to work on it here at school!

Comment if you have a question, and I'll comment back when I check!

Have fun, and remember, your voice matters!

Playing with Images!


I've had quite a few kiddo's ask how to make jpegs and manipulate the size so they'll fit across the top of their blog and act as a header. While I use Image composer, which is an archaic program, (if it aint broke, don't fix it :-) I don't know what everyone has at home. I'd love for all the kiddo's to learn Photoshop, but that takes money.

And so when I ran across this little jewel of a freebie I had to share! It's calledpixlr.com. It has similar features to Photoshop, and I'd love for the kiddo's to play! Now, you do have to sign up, which basically involves giving them your email and creating a password, but once that's taken care of you can create, layer, and put words on any picture you'd like. Too, some of the tools (such as the lasso, the wand, etc) are the same as Photoshop, so learn this first and when we get to that stage it'll be a breeze!

Now I'm learning this one with you, so I'm no expert. But if you have a questions feel free to post one and I'll see if I can't find the answer. As always, go play, have fun, be fearless, and learn something new!


Mrs. Isaacs.