This evenings conferences went really well, I think anyway. It was good to chat a little bit with some of you and just getting you a good solid update on your scholar.

I am looking forward to the rest of them tomorrow. As always, if you need to get a hold of me the best place to find that information is off the school’s official site, or leave a comment here with your email and I’ll get back to you ASAP. (Don’t worry, your email address won’t be published out into the world as long as you don’t post it into the message itself.)

Scholars are presenting their Providence powerpoints today and starting to work on their conference forms. There’s no homeowork!

Continuing to work on PowerPoint projects in class. It’s wonderful to see what the kids can do with it already. Projects are starting to be finished. Scholars will have about 25 minutes tomorrow to finish them up. Otherwise they will need to stick around at tutoring tomorrow after school to wrap it up. There is a bus that will drop them off at the nearest elementary school.

They can also come in before school Thursday and Friday, and during lunch tomorrow if they so choose.

This project is worth 100 points, so it is very important for them to follow through with it.

Today we started working on the wrap-up project for Canada.

The scholars will be creating and then presenting via PowerPoint a short talk about one of the thirteen Canadian provinces.

For those interested in Chess Club, the next meeting will be on Monday right after school. We’ll be breaking out the boards and playing against each other. No promises that Swanson will be throwing down as well.

It is all fine and good for me to make a post every day, but what if you had the ability to know about it nearly the instant I posted?

You do!

It’s called an RSS feed. There are many different ways to access the feed, but you need a second program (or a website!) to do so.

If you’re a Mac person like myself, I reccommend just using Safari’s built in RSS reader. You can save the feed by clicking on the blue “RSS” button in the address bar and then bookmarking that. Or, if you are about to dive into the wide world of lots of RSS feeds, you could get something like NewsFire.

For you PC people, I don’t know of any standalone readers that are any good. The PC people I know all use websites.

A good place to start is Google Reader. It is a pretty simple interface and if you have a Gmail account, you’re 3/4 of the way ready to start doing the RSS thing.

Another site that works well is BlogLines. I know a few people who very much enjoy it.

Once you get your reader all set up and ready to start plugging feeds you of course need the address to MY feed.

Well, you see the icon on the far upper right of the page that says RSS and has a little radio looking symbol? That’s the link to the feed! Or, you can just copy this into your new reader.

http://swansonteacher.com/?feed=rss2

Now, you can just sit back and check your reader for new posts rather than obsessively checking the site to see if there’s new posts.

Hopefully this guide has gotten you started in the right direction…and of course if you have a question, feel free to email me or leave a comment!