Dear Tech Explorer Parents,
As our technology explorer class comes to a close, I would like to say thank you. Thank you for allowing your child to be part of this wonderful group. Thank you, also, for your support and feedback.
To say that I am happy with how this class went would be an understatement. This group has been amazing. They are so cooperative and creative. Their personalities have really emerged in their blogs, and I feel that I really got to know each of them. Finally, I have to tell you how impressed I am with their technology skills and their understanding of how to represent themselves safely and appropriately online.
I gave them administrative control over their blogs because I wanted them to have total creative freedom. I made myself co-administrator on each blog and moderated comments from my email. I tried to make them aware that many people were watching them to see how they would handle this responsibility. Their actions would help determine whether students at our school (and maybe even elsewhere) would be allowed to blog and use other such interactive technologies in the future. I told them if there was even the slightest question of whether something was appropriate to post they should wait until they could ask me.
And they have made me very proud.
Now that the class is over and summer is coming, I will no longer be acting as co-administrator. If you would like your child to continue working on their blog over the summer, I ask that you become the co-admin. It is easy to set up, and I will do it for you. I will use your email, and comments will come to you for approval before being published on the blog. If you do not want this responsibility, I will be leaving the blog online, but closing students’ accounts. I trust that you understand.
If you would like to keep your child’s blog “open” please drop me a note with your email or email me. I will use your email address as the admin email and leave your child as blog administrator. I will send you their log-in information.
I hope that this class has been a very positive learning experience for your child, as it has for me.
Thank you again,
Mrs. Hernandez
Once you open it you can record your voice directly from the built-in mic on the computer. There are many effects, too, so play around and explore, but remember, your final sound file, the one you post on your blog, should be appropriate, not silly, and should communicate something of interest to your readers. When you have recorded something that you would like to post to your blog, you will have to export the file into an mp3 format, so that it can be uploaded to the blog. Then you upload the mp3 file similarly to the way you upload an image. If you want to make a voki, you should then go 
I chose this to represent this blog because I hope that this class will have the chance to connect with students around the world. I didn’t actually put it on the blog because it was already in the header I created. I got the picture from pics4learning, so I need to give a credit here for the image. You can easily get the image credit on pics4learning by clicking on the picture and copying where it says “bibliography.” Here is the image credit:NASA. earth.jpg. . Pics4Learning. 16 Mar 2008 <http://pics.tech4learning.com>Think about what type of image you would like to use to represent yourself!