Mr. Moss with Suzy Kline, author of the Horrible Harry book series and the Herbie Jones series.

Hello! Welcome to the online home of PGS Room 209. During the school year, I will update this web site regularly with information about activities happening in Room 209, bulletins and news items, current events related to what we’re studying in social studies, online assignments, and much more.

This will be my sixth year teaching at Pine Grove School. I graduated from the University of Rhode Island summa cum laude in 2004 and have a degree in Elementary Education and Psychology. While at URI, I taught grades 3, 4, and 5. I have also taught kindergarten, first, and second grade summer school, and I have interned with an elementary school principal in East Hartford. I have a background in experimental research in the field of social psychology, so you’ll probably see my interest in research and statistics come through this year during math lessons!  I’m currently finishing classes for my Masters Degree in Educational Technology at Central Connecticut State University‘s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Technology.  I’ll be done in the spring (hopefully!) and am developing two programs for my final projects.  One is a program that’s designed to teach different strategies to help kids perform well on the Connecticut Mastery Tests, and the other is an interactive storybook that will help kids learn how to create short answer responses (SAR) to open-ended reading comprehension questions.  The Room 209 fourth graders will get to try out both programs this year.

In my spare time, I like to travel to Rhode Island, Boston, or New York City.  I also enjoy making movies on my Mac, working on home improvement projects (which took up most of my time this summer), or just relaxing by cooking, listening to old time radio shows from the 1940s and 50s, reading comic books, or watching the news. I collect old reel to-reel tapes of music, antique or unusual telephones, and all things related to Star Trek.  My wife and I have a wonderful dog named Rimley.  Rimley is about two-and-a-half years old, and he is a cockapoo (cocker spaniel and poodle mix).  I’m sure you’ll hear all about him during the year!  I enjoy tinkering with my computer and coming up with interesting ways in which I can use technology in the classroom. (You can definitely expect to use computers a lot in Room 209! I am the school’s lead technology teacher, and I enjoy using computers, our class’ SMART Board, and other technologies while teaching.) Of course, I also love watching my favorite sports team, the Boston Red Sox! (Don’t worry Yankees fans, I promise not to be mean!)

This summer has been an usually busy one.  Besides spending time moving classrooms and learning all about the great things that we’re going to do in fourth grade, I also spent a lot of time on projects around the house.  My wife and I have a baby due in December, so we’re having a lot of fun getting ready for him/her.  (We aren’t finding out whether it’s a boy or a girl; we want to be surprised!)  I also spent a lot of the summer working on our new class website, which you’re looking at right now.  Look at one of the following posts for information about why I made a new website and what some of the new features are.

It’s going to be a great year in fourth grade.  There are so many new things to learn, and there are some really interesting activities coming up!  I can’t wait for the new year to begin!

For more information about our class, click “Read the rest of the entry”.

Read the rest of this entry »

I challenge each and every student in our class to participate in the 2009 Governor’s Summer Reading Challenge.  Does that list seem a bit overwhelming?  It all starts with one book.  …or one magazine.  …or maybe an article.  All it takes is one piece of reading.  Once you have read just one title, you’re a participant!  Once you’ve read one book, it’s easy to make that TWO books.  Then it can become THREE.  Before you know it, you’ll have several titles on your list.

But remember, it all starts with one book.

If everyone in Room 209 participates in the Governor’s Summer Reading Challenge, I have a very special reward up my sleeve waiting for you.  Are you curious what it is?  You’ll find out on the first day of school!

If you need another copy of the reading log, you can print it out by clicking here.  But any paper will work!

Remember, it all starts with one book.  If you haven’t started yet, now is a perfect time!

The old EDvantaged.com Class Blog site

When I started teaching third grade at PGS five years ago, we used a website called Schoolnotes to give teachers a homepage.  The site worked well for a while, but I found that it had a tendency to be unstable and to lose information.  In April of 2005, I worked with a friend of mine (who is a web developer) to create EDvantaged.com.  I hoped that, in addition to being the home of our new class site, EDvantaged would grow to be a site that would give educational technology resources for teachers and supportive materials and ideas for parents.  Unfortunately, teaching really is a full-time job, and I have never really had time to develop the other elements of the site besides the class blog.  A blog is a website that allows a person (or a group of people) to post periodic messages about any topic under the sun.  There are blogs about cuisine, travel, science, and (of course) politics.  The nice thing about blogs is that anyone can be a blogger about any topic, and some of the most obscure topics have developed the greatest followings on the internet.

Blogs are particularly good for classroom teachers like be, because they allow me to post regular updates about class news, activities, and assignments.  The chronological ordering of blog posts provides a logical organization to the site’s structure.  The Room 201 Class Blog was the online home of my third grade class for a little more than four years.  Although moving to fourth grade gave me a good opportunity to build a new blog site, the change was long overdue.  I found that the blog’s framework software, called LifeType, which was once at the forefront of blog administration, had become dated and clumsy to use when compared to newer frameworks (such as WordPress, which this site runs off).  It also didn’t allow me to format the posts as easily as I wanted, which made posting updates a longer and more difficult process for me.  Most notably, however, LifeType had security weaknesses that allowed for the possibility of the site being compomised – something that’s unacceptable when the content of the site is, among other things, for kids and about kids.

This new blog site uses the most modern blogging software available and has robust security safeguards.  Here are some of the features of the new site that are either active now or soon to be active:

• Users need to be registered with accounts in order to post comments.
• Sensitive information will be restricted so that only registered and approved users can access it.  (Coming soon!)
• Key content areas have been given special pages (see the top of the sidebar on the left side of the page).
• We now have a counter that shows how much money has been donated to Gifts of Love as part of our Room 209 C.A.R.E.S. program.
• Homework assignments and spelling words will be posted on the website.  (Note:  This is a pilot test to see whether students and parents find this to be helpful.  Please give me feedback as the year progresses!)
• Users can setup RSS feeds in order to automatically deliver site updates to their web browsers.  (Not sure what RSS is?  Click here.)
• The search feature (top right of the site) is more effective than the search on the old site.  (…hopefully!)
• Posts can be better organized into categories and sub-categories.
• Links for students and parents are better structured than on the old site.  (Coming soon!)
• The new site looks more mature and visually-appealing, I think.  (I didn’t design the color scheme or exact layout of the site, but I’d love feedback anyway!)

Finally, please consider using Mozilla Firefox to view this website.  There are some nice formatting elements that are improperly shown or totally missing when the site is accessed with Internet Explorer or Google Chrome.  (The problem lies with Internet Explorer’s inability to understand some forms of modern coding that are generally accepted by the web design community.)  Besides being able to show the site the way it’s intended, Firefox is a great browser on its own!