Friday, May 25, 2007

Newton, TX?

I am pretty excited! This Monday while everyone else is enjoying a grilled hamburger and a cold ice-tea remembering all that we're suppose to on Memorial Day, I'll be flying to Houston, TX. From there, I'll rent a car, meet up with Sister Matthew Marie and head towards Newton, TX. We are part of a small team presenting there on Tuesday. Both of us had won honors of being "Best of the Best" with past presentations at NECC and Newton has requested our sessions for their training day. That's pretty cool!
So I decided to do some research. First I looked up Newton ISD. I only found the sites that let you rate schools. Next I looked up Newton, TX. I found out they have 1 hotel, that also doubles as the RV Park - and has a pretty neat little gift shop. They also have 2 restaurants, and neither look like a chain, which should mean some great food! I did the entire Google Earth search as well. I need to program my Garmin still and hope that it can find the place. All my friends know I am geographically challenged.
Chris Marshall helped me find the school website. They use eChalk, which is one of my favorite tools for teachers - even though it's not free. They do have excellent customer service, the program was easy to use, and my teachers took to it pretty well.
It's a two hour drive from Houston to Newton. I'm driving with Sister Matthew Marie in the navigation seat. I was already warned not to speed with a sister in the car, and no death metal -although I can't say that I listen to that stuff anyway. The hardest I listen to is probably Bon Jovi.
Any "tools" you want to remind me of before I take my trip? Of course I'll be sharing some of my favorite Scholastic tools, and even though I no longer work for Discovery - I still love their stuff and the people that work for them. Thank you Kathy and Scott for the goodies! Gaggle's services are also on my list, and Jeff and Andrea made sure I was up to date with their new features. Tech4Learning - one of my FAVORITE companies sent me copies of their new magazine, Creative Educator. (Check it out! It's really hard for me to force myself to wait and read it on the plane. I saw an article in there from one of my favorite authors!). Lindy has done a fantastic job on this new venture. I'll be sharing their T4L and Pics4Learning. Inspiration, My FAVORITE SOFTWARE, has also sent me goodies to share, along with the fine people over at Teacher Web and PBS. In true Microsoft fashion, they offered to let me buy stuff from their corporate site. I turned down that offer. I never could get through to Google, but they are on my list. I have a pretty long list that I won't mention here. But just in case, I'm missing something send me a reminder in the comments.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Be safe out there in Texas Danielle!

Here's my list of things to remember:
1. blue armadillo - LOVE that little program to resize batches of images.
2. Zamzar - file conversion software. Can't beat it. Especially when you have a non-editing adobe pdf file. Easy conversion right over to a .doc!
3. diigo - I'm telling ya, this little plugin for firefox is awesome!
4. Bloglines or any other RSS aggregator.

Mimi said...

How exciting! Be careful and enjoy.
I am hooked on all things Google right now. Picasa's new slide show web album that creates a little flash file for my blog is very cool.And have you checked out Page Creator? It's still in the lab but it will change the way that I teach teachers to publish web pages. Inserting a Google calendar on a web page is easy too and my teachers love that. The last web page design class that I taught turned into a Google class.
I'll have to check out your resources. Thanks for providing links. I am not familiar with all of them. Marsha Cruce