The Polar Bears are a fifth grade class in the Tampa, Florida area. We started off online in 1997.
Mr. Roemer is the mean teacher, but the kids still manage to get by. We are called the Polar Bears because we are very cool! We try to be a role model class for the school.
We have received some press, mostly because we've been blogging and reporting class progress online for a relatively long time. The St. Petersburg Times did an article about the class on August 9th, 2005. Click here to read it.
WTSP called me soft-spoken. Ha! Maybe because there was a reporter and film crew in the class. The video is gone, but the story is still there.
From Fox 13 News, January 2007 (and an early attempt for me to convert to flash...there is a play button to click near the bottom of the black square):
We were proud recipients of the Reading Teacher Magazine's Miss Rumphius Award during this site's formative years. The now defunct Miss Rumphius Award was presented by members of the RTEACHER mailing list (listserv), a mailing list of literacy educators run in conjunction with The Reading Teacher, a journal of the International Reading Association. It goes to "teachers who have developed exceptional curricular resources on the Internet and share these with others, making all of our instructional worlds better."
We're also mentioned in chapter 11 of the book "Teaching With The Internet," Third Edition, written by Donlad J. Leu and Deborah Diadiun Leu.
