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

STEP mtg next week - working on wiki

Working on my STEP wiki, creating the page to link to the News Team wiki. Including summaries, technology standards, banners, etc. Lots of work but it's good for me to be learning new things and using them often enough to remember them.

Wiki needs more entries

Today was the first deadline for our next newspaper and many articles were due. Unfortunately, there were quite a few missing articles. As usual, a few kids are gung-ho and posted their articles well and early. Sometimes it's surprising that the gung-ho kids are the ones I'd predict to be. I was hoping that the students would really like using the wiki and would get on the band wagon. I must remember that these kids are children who aren't necessarily self-starters, and who didn't really know what was expected when they volunteered for the News Team. I must be more creative with my incentives, and possibly make them more competitive with each other. I still think the wiki is a big improvement over all other former article submission methods.

Technology marches on

This morning was MOD-MSA online training at Dr. Henry Wise High School, and then I went on to John Jennings's zone tech liaison's meeting at Tulip Grove. Everything was hands-on, which is always a good thing if managed well. It's easy for the presenter to lose his/her audience if they start pursuing their own interests, checking email, etc. However, it's so much better to try out what is being presented while the leader is available to help with any confusion or other difficulties. It takes very careful planning of the PD session to carry this off. The morning session was led by Teresa O'Connor and Joan Rothgeb. Both were excellent - highly knowledgeable, approachable, and efficient, so it was a very useful session. John is always very well prepared for his sessions and sprinkles in a good dose of humor and humility, so the meetings are very worthwhile. He seems to have a good handle on what's going on in the county and how to effectively balance our directives with our workload

New departments for News Team

The News Team has put out 2 issues with the original department assignments, so we chose new departments today for the next 2 issues. It worked out unusually well, with few students disappointed with the end result. Thank goodness for the random number generator. We were able to refer to the old department assignments in the wiki for reference, so that was helpful once again.

PreK-8 Transition Meeting Last Night

Last night was the meeting at BES to present the current plans to change our school into PreK-7 next year; preK-8 the following. The meeting was mainly a question-and-answer session with Steve (and Leslie) answering questions raised by parents in the cafeteria. The meeting was fairly well attended by both English and Spanish-speaking parents, although the attendance was small compared to the total number of parents for our school. I guess the parents of preimary students either think things will change by the time their student gets to that grade (maybe) or they'll have moved to a different town by then. Who knows? The meeting was very civil -- no one was confrontational or asked awkward questions. One key question that wasn't raised was whether Steve will still be at BES next year. That's crucial and nobody asked it. At any rate, PowerPoint could have been used to show areas of the building being discussed (locker rooms, science rooms) but under the circumstances it probably wouldn't have been worth the trouble to create it. It's kind of a relief not to be looking at a screen at every meeting.

This and that

Geography Bee last night went well. We had to put the program together quickly at the last minute and we weren't sure which adults would be available. No Patty Robeson -- it just didn't seem right, although we carried on OK anyway. Pete Odell made an excellent judge for the second year in a row.

Our practice MSA tests went OK. There's certainly a lot of work to setting all of them up with appropriate accommodations. It will be interesting to see how the students do on the real tests, particularly the online Mod MSA. Since it's presented by the same Pearson Access that the online science was last year, it should work dependably. However, how much science do the students really know?

It seems like a long time between STEP sessions. This year (#2 for the school, if not for me) doesn't seem nearly as heavy in participant requirements as last, although it's also not rich in hardware benefits. I'm sure we'll be glad we entered, although it's hard to keep up the enthusiasm with such long gaps between sessions.

Inauguration Day

President Barak Obama. Who would every have guessed?... What will that mean for technology? For education? For testing? For the economy? I guess time will tell.

Google Earth for Geo Team

Since the Computer Lab windows are back in and the Geography Team can meet in our room instead of in the library, we had the students using Google Earth. After I demo-ed it, I had the kids, working in pairs, locating specific places around the world and taking screen shots of a list of places. Then they inserted one of their shots into a MS Word document and wrote a few sentences about that place. Not bad for 30 minutes! As you would expect, a few kids were very knowledgeable about Google Earth, while most had never used it. Good hands-on approach for continents, countries, landforms, landmarks, etc.

What should I blog about?

I have nothing to say. The holidays are over and school is back in session. Big tests are coming so I'll be using technology for that, rather than for direct instruction of students. Bleak mid-winter...

Happy New Year

'Twas a lovely holiday season. I wonder what it will be like with a baby next year? I wonder what technology will be like by the time he's my age. Kinda scary!

I'm keeping these "postings" for when we can actually put them somewhere. Our initial STEP meeting was "interesting" at Ammendale but we need to meet again soon so as not to let the enthusiasm drop. Still, it was an honor to be chosen and we BES'ers need to have a good showing for our school.