TEACHERS' MENTOR - What's New?

November 30, 2007

Yahoo! has a new free service exclusively for teachers. I signed up to be notified when I read about it a few months ago. I got an email today that the beta version is active. It will let teachers create and share standards-based materials and connect to other teachers. It looks like it could become a very effective tool for teachers. If you are interested, check it out here.

July, 2007

It is such a joy to learn something new. For me, to stop learning would be to die. Joshua Reynolds, an eighteenth century painter expressed it well.

The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.

And I need to share what I have learned, to teach. Thankfully, my current job in computer education for preschools and afterschool programs still allows me to share the joy.

One area of new learning since my retirement has been computer graphics. I became interested when I purchased Paint Shop Pro to make graphic buttons for the earlier versions of this website. I have continued to work with PSP and have started on the long trek of mastering Photoshop.

I mention this here because my latest graphics projects have been making materials for digital scrapbooking. I have created a subdomain where you can get the best of these graphics without charge for your personal use or for use in the classroom. The Terms of Use allow the graphics to be put on a school server. These are print-quality graphics that can also be used for paper crafts.

Scrapgraphics @ Teachers' Mentor

Photography has also become more of an interest since I no longer have to worry about the cost of film. I share some of my nature photographs on my blog. You are welcome to use these photos for classroom purposes. You will also find some PSP tutorials and posts about my trials in learning Photoshop. And, of course, there are occasional posts about the cats, the deer eating my flowers, and other adventures(?) of living in the boonies. I hope you will drop in for a visit.

From a Mountain Hollow

I have not stayed current with what is happening on a daily basis in American education. To be frank, I got depressed from reading and hearing about it and just stopped. For me, much of the purpose and enjoyment of teaching was fostering a life-long desire to learn. When do you get to share with students the joy of learning for the sake of learning when all you are doing is teaching for a test, and another test, and another test? I think in the long run, our society will suffer from this current trend. (Getting off my soapbox.)

Since I have not kept up with current educational trends, I no longer feel qualified to offer advice. The mentor portion of the website is basically "as is" now. Visitors do seem to find something useful in the articles they find here. As long as people keep visiting and I can afford to pay the monthly fee, I will leave the site up.

I am no longer sending out update messages. Anything I might add in the future will be mentioned here. The problem I have had with spammers spoofing my site domain has probably caused anything from me to be filtered as spam anyway.

I will continue to check for dead links. I am currently in the process of going through my pages to check links and in a few cases to recode to make it more up-to-date. This is especially true of the print versions of my articles which are still in HTML 4.0. If you see a page with the "signup for updates" button, you will know I have not worked on that page yet.

Have a good summer!

Mary