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TEACHERS.NET GAZETTE
Volume 4 Number 3

COVER STORY
Happy 7th Anniversary Teachers.Net...
ARTICLES
Happy 7th Anniversary Teachers.Net by Dave Melanson
How Not to Get Into College: The Preoccupation with Preparation by Alfie Kohn
No Child Left Behind or Leave the Thinking to Us by Simon Hole
Greetings! - Update from Operation Deep Freeze by LT. Marshall Branch
Technology Reform in Schools by Daisy Marie (Price) Hicks
Special Skills for Classroom Management by Stelios Perdios
Looking for a teaching job? Ten Tips for Job Hunters by LFSmith
Gems of Wisdom from Joy Jones
Featuring Past Author/Illustrator Chat Guests by Kathleen Alape Carpenter, Editor
Editor's e-Picks - March Resources by Kathleen Alape Carpenter, Editor
Spotlight on NEW CD Set - How to Improve Student Achievement from EffectiveTeaching.com
Living Up to David Ruggles by Caroline Edens Bundy
Retirement Career Counseling by Dan Lukiv
Addressing the Shuttle Tragedy by Zanada Maleki
Novel Studies, Help students "switch on" to a novel by Margaret Veitch
Student Stars Become Constellations by Jerry Taylor
Pre-writing Center from Teachers.Net's Early Childhood Chatboard
Odd Facts from the Second Grade Mailring
March Columns
March Regular Features
March Informational Items
Gazette Home Delivery:

 
About Dave Melanson...
Dave Melanson is located in Montreal Canada. He has five years experience presenting seminars and sensitization training to elementary schoolteachers on mainstreaming and integrating visually impaired and blind children into the regular classroom. During the past 2 years he has begun to branch outside of the Montreal area and is now covering other Canadian Provinces as well as the U.S. When giving seminars Dave brings with him a briefcase of 10 pairs of simulator glasses, each allowing the wearer to experience a different type of visual impairment.

Dave will provide a tape of a previous seminar to any school district interested in booking a presentation in order to demonstrate the topics he covers with regard to integration and mainstreaming a sight impaired or blind child.

You may contact Dave for more information by e-mail at melanson@teachers.net or by telephone: 514 7683264. Dave can also be found in the Teachers.Net chatroom many evenings during the week, logged on as Dave/Montreal.



Teacher Feature...

Teachers.Net Celebrates 7 Years Online

This month, Teachers.Net celebrates 7 years as the leading Internet resource for educators, online since March 1996. In deciding how to make note of this special occasion, we decided that the following essay by Dave Melanson sums up pretty well what Teachers.Net is all about. So, we at Teachers.Net enthusiastically raise our cyber-glasses to join Dave in his toast to the first 7 years, to the future, and to the tens of thousands of educators who make Teachers.Net such a special niche on the World Wide Web.

Following the essay are links to some of our history. We hope you'll enjoy the trip down Memory Lane.

Bob Reap, Tony Bott,
Kathleen Carpenter & Mary Miehl

Happy 7th Anniversary Teachers.Net

by Dave Melanson


Ladies and gentleman, would you all please take a moment to raise your glasses with me in a toast to the finest website on the WWW. Which site am my referring, to you may ask. Why it is our own beloved Teachers.Net of course.

The site first came into existence in March of 1996 and in the very beginning there was only a chatboard. The site eventually grew to having a live chatroom and kept expanding over the years to where it is today, a wonderful and valuable resource.

I first came to Teachers.Net in the fall of 1999. I had just got set up here at home on the Internet and had recently come home from a workshop in Halifax, Nova Scotia where I presented to elementary teachers on "inclusion" of sight impaired and blind children into the regular classroom environment.

I slowly began to make a lot of friends in the Teachers.Net chatroom and now see many of these friendships as very valuable, special and dear to me.

My discovery of Teachers.Net could not have come at a better time, the previous year my mom had passed away and I was generally taking a while to get over this and adjust to the major changes that had happened to me.

I remember how welcoming everyone was to me when I first started coming to the chatroom. It was as though I had found a new way to get the positive message out about "inclusion" of sight impaired and blind children in the classroom.

One of the other things that has really made a positive impact for me also are the Teachers.Net gatherings. If you have not yet been to one, I urge you to do so as soon as you can. You will find that these gatherings are a wonderful way to network with your colleagues around the world.

Many classroom exchange projects are happening now between teachers as a result of Teachers.Net. The site is an international resource which is modeled on effective and creative use of the Internet to accomplish a very special mission---to promote good will and the exchange of ideas among educators from every corner of the globe.

A very special thanks should go to Bob Reap Teachers.Net webmaster and creator (with Tony Bott), and Kathleen Carpenter and Mary Miehl who do endless wonderful work to keep the site going on a daily basis. Without them, Teachers.Net would not be nearly what it is today.

Please tell as many of your colleagues as possible about the wonderful resources found here at Teachers.Net, including the live meetings and conference sessions as well as the archived sessions and issues of the monthly webzine, the Teachers.Net Gazette.

The list of resources is endless and ever-growing along with all of our friendships in the Teachers.Net chatroom. Every day it seems there are many wonderful new chatters coming to join us in what is a close and special community. With this growth comes new ideas for positive ways to approach education and make learning fun and challenging at the same time.

In closing, I offer my sincere best wishes to Teachers.Net for a very happy 7th anniversary. May you have many more productive years of service to the educational community. As you continue to foster the growth of friendships and cooperation around the world, you make things better for future generations of educators and students.

As I raise my glass in a toast to this wonderful community of which we are all a part, please join me in this worldwide toast.


5 Year Anniversary Article: http://teachers.net/gazette/MAR01

7/02/98 Chat With Site Creators Tony & Bob http://teachers.net/archive/tony_bob.html


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