This story can fit 175-225 words.

The purpose of a newsletter is to provide specialized information to a targeted audience. Newslet-ters can be a great way to mar-ket your product or service, and also create credibility and build your organization’s identity among peers, members, employ-ees, or vendors.

First, determine the audience of the newsletter. This could be anyone who might benefit from the information it contains, for example, employees or people interested in purchasing a prod-uct or requesting your service.

You can compile a mailing list from business reply cards, cus-tomer information sheets, busi-ness cards collected at trade shows, or membership lists. You might consider purchasing a mail-

ing list from a company.

If you explore the Publisher cata-log, you will find many publica-tions that match the style of your newsletter.

Next, establish how much time and money you can spend on your newsletter. These factors will help determine how fre-quently you publish the newslet-ter and its length. It’s recom-mended that you publish your newsletter at least quarterly so that it’s considered a consistent source of information. Your customers or employees will look forward to its arrival.

This story can fit 75-125 words.

Your headline is an important part of the newsletter and should be considered carefully.

In a few words, it should accu-rately represent the contents of the story and draw readers into the story. Develop the headline before you write the story. This

way, the headline will help you keep the story focused.

Examples of possible headlines include Product Wins Industry Award, New Product Can Save You Time!, Membership Drive Exceeds Goals, and New Office Opens Near You.

Caption describing picture or graphic.

Lead Story Headline

I N S I D E T H I S I S S U E :

Magnetic Poetry

2

Phonics 2

Women’s History Month

3

Yellowstone Videos

3

Eyewitness to History

4

Teachers Love SmartBoards

4

Secondary Story Headline

WAU

SEO

N

SCH

OO

LS

Technology Bytes M A R C H 2 0 0 9 V O L U M E I I , I S S U E 5

S P E C I A L P O I N T S O F I N T E R E S T :

• Short How- To’s that

you can do!

• Computer Tips that

you need to know!

• Websites you’ll want

to visit

You can begin using the Jeopardy Game today. Go to the Staff Shared directory, click on the Jeopardy folder, and double click on the Jeopardy icon. If you would like help on this activity, email Lyn to set up a time to get together to work on this fun activity. wau_aca_lm @nwoca.org

P A G E 2

Phonics http://www.sadlier-oxford.com/phonics/student.cfm

Magnetic Poetry http://www.magpo.com/kidspoetry/playonline.cfm

It's hard to keep up with all the people talking about The Magnetic Poetry for Kids website. If you just spent a few minutes playing with the various "kits" your brain may not shut off thinking about how many ways this site can be used inside the classroom. First of all, this is a very simple concept. The site has a work area on the left side of the screen and a collection of words and/or phrases on the right-hand side. To use the program, students simply touch and drag the words into the work area. Words can be moved around with ease and placed anywhere the student or teacher desires. Teachers could easily pre-pare the work area to con-tain words for the students to use to build sentences or they could allow students to explore the word collec-tion and choose their own.

This may help teachers to differentiate the learning process and control the difficulty of the task. "Make a sentence that contains one noun, one verb, and one adjective." "Build a 10 word sentence from the group of words in the word collection." "Find all the nouns in the top part of the refrigera-tor. "Find the verbs that de-scribe what you can do on

a rainy day." The kids area contains four different kits that contain different word collections including a "First Words" kit and a "Story Maker" kit. This site works ex-tremely well with the SMART Board. You can also increase the zoom level of your browser to make sure the applica-tion fills the entire screen!

This site has online phonics games for grades PreK-6. Activities include long vowels, short vowels, high frequency words, digraphs, contractions, suffixes, homonyms, synonyms,antonyms, This could be a great classroom activity on the SmartBoard.

T E C H N O L O G Y B Y T E S

March Is Women’s History Month P A G E 3 V O L U M E I I , I S S U E 5

Take one of many virtual field trips to Yellowstone. Though the site suggests registration by a teacher, it is not required for the eTrips. View field trips such as "Getting Into Hot Water," "Yellowstone Exposed," "Where The Bison Roam," and "Geyser Quest." Many of the field trips have video and audio components and last approximately 50 minutes. Free registration provides more resources, including a link with lesson plans for teachers. Grades 5-8

Windows into Wonderland

Click on any of the pictures here to go to links about Women’s History Month.

http://www.windowsintowonderland.org/

This is a fantastic website for Smartboard re-sources. You could spend many hours on this site and still find new things to use with your class. The website changes with new notebook activities, websites to use with your Smartboard, tips and tricks, etc. There is truly a wealth of information here. If you are only going to have one reference online for your Smartboard, this is definitely the site!

There are online training activities. If you look carefully, some are even FREE! Others cost a few dollars, but each lesson leads you step by step through creating a Notebook activity, which you can then apply to what you are teaching. To get to the free ones, you have to email the in-structor for the key code, but he sends it promptly.

You can also sign up to get automatic updates from this website in your email.

Primary sources can give students that sense of "you are there"

that can make history come alive. They can also give valuable

insight into the context and culture of the time and place that is

remote from our own. Without the interpretation, summariza-

tion, and dilution that comes from textbook accounts written by

committee, these narratives are invaluable to those who want to

understand history in its purest sense. This site provides a large,

indexed database of first person accounts and contemporaneous

accounts of important eras and events in history. Search by time

period or general topic and get speeches, diaries, and eyewitness

accounts. Use the "History in Motion" tab to view film clips

(requiring Flash). SnapShots provides photo montages from

recent history. The home page is updated regularly to include

"this month in history" features, a photo of the week, and a list

of new entries to the database. It's fun to browse and explore on

its own, but there is also a comprehensive index if you're search-

ing for something in particular.

Teachers Love Smartboards! www.wauseon.k12.oh.us

http://smartboards.typepad.com/smartboard/

History for Grades 6-12 http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/