Tossing around ideas

When I was growing up and going to school, I never took the time to sit and think how much time and effort my teachers took to plan lessons, projects, and activities. Now, that I am having to take that time to think about what I would like to do in my classroom, I realize how hard my teachers worked outside of the classroom. I now have a newfound respect for them.

In a perfect world, I would have all of the best things for my classroom, money could buy. I'm talking about having a completely SMART room, complete with computers for every student and me being technologically efficient. We all know that this dream is not reality. In reality, our school systems are budget crisis', students not being able to keep up with the curriculum, the economy, and teachers and staff are being handed pink slips left and right. Teachers are also facing the change in the students. These new students are all technologically literate and they need to learn with a computer. All of these reasons combined, gave me the idea to try and come up with a few ideas about what I would want to do in my classroom on a budget.

I would like to have at least one computer so that we could have a class blog for the students to be able to post some of their work on to there, and also so that I could post all test, homework, and classwork in case a student or parent needed to know. Instead of having posters on the walls, I would like for each student to color a whole sheet of paper of whatever he/she wanted to draw. After that I would like to hang them on my wall to display their artwork, so that they can be proud of what they have done. Another idea that I had, was to have my student Skype other students from anywhere in the world , so that they will have the ability to connect and learn from others. It is a free service, so it would be very easy to manage and do. One of my last ideas that I had was to teach my students to "go green." We could have a class project of recycling everything that we use to see how much garbage we throw away. These are all just a few ideas that I was tossing around in my head, I would love any and all suggestions!