Gaggle

My school system has a Gaggle account for all our students in the district. Today a technology specialist from the county met with me to introduce me to Gaggle's e-mail. He has offered to come back next week to assist me in training my students how to send and receive e-mail. I feel very fortunate to have someone to help me out. I can't wait to get my students up and going. He also briefly went over the blogging Gaggle. I think I'm going to set one up for both of my reading classes and my homeroom as well. I still feel a little overwhelmed but overall I'm really looking forward to integrating e-mail and blogging into my classroom.

Reflection and Implementation
I have been using Gaggle with my students to allow them to send e-mails back and forth to each other. Occassionally I have sent them e-mails complimenting them on their usuage and sometimes about the book we are reading. I ask them about their library books and they seem to really enjoy writing back. They even created their own profile pages. They think this is really cool! The most useful feature that I've found with Gaggle is the digital locker. Anything that my students start at school they upload to their digital locker so that if they need to access it from home they can. When we were working on a Lost Colony booklet a couple of weeks ago some of my students choose to type their book. Having the access to the digital locker made it possible for them to finish up typing at home. I will definitely continue to use Gaggle in my classroom.