STEP tomorrow!

This is the last day of my spring date. I have so much I wanted to accomplish this past week and most of it isn't done. I'm spending my whole day doing some intensive work setting up my podcast and working on my wiki. It's fun but I need to be painting!

To create banners on my STEP wiki pages, I created what I wanted as a headline in MS Word, then, using Apple/Shift/4 took screen shots. I launched Adobe Photoshop, then opened the screen shots on the desktop, changed the image size and saved as JPEG. These files were then imported into the wiki and could be resized there.

Spring break

Taking a chance to work on the computer, including SchoolMax attendance and grade managing prior to next week's report card window. I'm also getting fairly comfortable with this blogging, although it seems like a stream of consciousness activity/journal. STEP is next week and I'm giving more thought to the worthwhile use of a podcast. A student-recorded Pledge will be very useful but I'm not sure whether I also need to produce my own generated podcast or not. We have 2 different sets of instructions. We'll find out next week, I guess.

Baby tomorrow!

Unless Marné has her baby today I get to spend tomorrow at the hospital waiting for my grandson to arrive. I wonder what his name will be?

I haven't spent much time this week thinking about the STEP team because I'm still deeply embroiled in MSA record-keeping, although a great deal of it is on my laptop. Thank goodness for Excel, and being able to scan the booklet barcodes has been fun (?) and worthwhile, albeit quirky.

Wiki comes through

We did our first day of News Team layout yesterday for our March/April issue. With MSA causing a 3-week delay in publishing, it gave the kids time to get all of the missing articles posted and all were there except Chris's 4th grade, which Elizabeth did for him. I would like to the reporters to control the font name and size on the wiki so the layout kids wouldn't have to adjust each article when placed in MS Word.

In the middle of MSA

MSA Reading has been given except for make-ups, and I'm getting ready for MSA Math. The 5 6th graders who took the Mod MSA online seemed to get along quite well, although it was certainly helpful to them to have one-on-one accommodators, online or not. As school test coordinator I'm really swamped with MSA right now and have had to cancel our News Team meeting this week. I encouraged the reporters to edit each other's articles carefully -- I sure hope they are. I haven't had time to check.

Uh oh!

I just checked the history section of some key pages of our News Team wiki and found that students have deleted each articles and/or made erroneous changes to them. Knowing which students did this tells me that it was accidental. However, a student told me yesterday that her article had disappeared from the wiki, and sure enough, it did! I'll track this down, talk to the offender on Monday, and discuss it with the whole team as soon as I can.

I need to be coming up with some idea for using podcasting.

Podcasting session

Podcasting was interesting today. I can see how it could be a very useful tool in a regular classroom for lots of content areas. It will be a challenge to work it into my News Team project, but since this is the only group of students I can call "mine," other than the keyboarders, I'm sure something will come to mind. It was funny how self-conscious the BES STEP teachers were -- we pretty much chose to type our responses, rather than speaking them. I noticed that teachers from other schools were more vocal -- I recognized good ole Robert Beaumier's enthusiastic voice. He's always upbeat.

URL: voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/k-2