Just finished moving from room 218 to 225.  While it is a short walk, it is certainly a long way to move a ton of books.  I'm feeling right now like it was worth it though.  225 is much more roomy.  In 218, it felt like I taught in a bathtub--the students and I were smashed together.  Also, getting ready to start the new school year is exciting, and I'm hoping my former and new students don't think I'm yelling all the time because of our close proximity.  Come check out the new hut if you haven't yet and say hi.  Can't wait to see ya'll in a couple of days.  Oh yeah . . .  I'm looking for a new classroom name.  When I was downstairs, I was in D3 and we were the D3 Family.  In 218, we were Team 218.  I'm having trouble coming up with a new name.  Any help or suggestions would really be awesome.  I don't want to be "Just 225."  We need an identity!

This is my first blog post ever!  Strange.  Also this is coming late.  These projects were done last June by my 10th graders.  However, since this website was not in existence then, I have the perfect excuse.  These are not all of the projects, but some of the more visually stimulating ones.  The idea was for my students to build the 21st century school.   They had to have a visual component and a written one.  I also had them add a model classroom on the campus.  This comes from the Slate contest in 2010 were they had readers build a model 5th grade classroom.  If you want to see the winner it is located in the 10 grade page under "A Place Called School."  The classroom that is located inside a box in the slide show (even though it is falling apart now) was an interesting classroom model by Alan Yang.  The four general genre or text types I see are brochures, posters, models, and school handbooks.  I used a model from our school handbook as a mentor text for the students.  I think this helped the students with putting the parts together.  Futhermore, this year, I had a few websites.  I will try to upload them when I locate them--I've lost track of them.  It was clear to me that the students struggled with the formatting of the website, but we will work on making them more visual appealing next year. I want to leave you with a question: how would you design the 21st century school?