EL FIN!

Today I went to the school to do the last lesson with the kids. They are currently learning how to answer the question ¿Qué te gusta hacer? (What do you like to do?). The students were partnered up and they interviewed each other to find out what they all liked and didn’t like the do. They then typed it up and it was posted to the class website. These blurbs can then be taken, names removed, and used in another lesson. They can be projected from the site onto the board, where the students can read them and try to match the blurbs to the correct classmate.

Today’s lesson went very smoothly and I really enjoyed doing it. There was a bit of technical difficulty with the computers, but nothing horrible. I think when I get into the classroom I will always aim to just take my students to a lab where, in theory, there will be less problems.

And now to begin composing my movie……..

1 comment November 30, 2009 eaj5450

Anticipation….

This project has taken much longer than I expected it and I am getting more frustrated as time goes by. I feel like the site we’ve created together isn’t going to get any use after I leave that classroom and that leaves me with 1 options…
1) we picked the wrong avenue to go down and should have gone down another technological road

So, at this point I am feeling pretty discouraged about my whole project. I know that I have taught this teacher a way in which he could integrate technology into his classroom, but I feel as though if he doesn’t then integrate it, I’ve done something wrong by not choosing the appropriate technology to match the teacher and his teaching style. So, while the experience has been a very valuable one, I am very ready for it to be over.

1 comment November 5, 2009 eaj5450

First Lessons

I went to the school on Wednesday to teach my first lessons – the AUP, Gmail, and the Class Google Site. The kids were great! They were about as well behaved as you can expect 9th graders to be, but they were very excited about the idea of having an interactive class website. Using the laptop carts was kind of a pain in the butt though… First, it took forever to find them, then forever to retrieve the keys for them. Then, google wouldn’t allow some of the students to create gmail accounts because some of the IP address they were attached to had already been used to create gmail accounts by other students. Other than that snag, they learned about the AUP, how to make spanish symbols on a computer (PC or Mac), and how to navigate and use the class website. Ugh….hopefully my teacher will get me the names of all the students who still need accounts SOON and we can get them created and continue on with the lessons….. we’ll see….

Add comment October 18, 2009 eaj5450

All Systems are GO

Met with my teacher today and we created his class website together. It’s currently not that interesting, but all the aspects are there, it even has a picture on the homepage and the syllabus. We reserved two Mac Laptop carts for Wed the 14th so I can go in and talk to the kids about the AUP, help them set up gmail accounts, and introduce them to the site. So I guess really I need to do is actually put my lesson plans into words and on paper… we’ll see how that goes…

1 comment October 7, 2009 eaj5450

Meeting Dos

We met today to discuss a little further our plans. We’ve decided to create a class website, like the one we have in EDLF 5450. After the website is created we will take the students to the lab and they will all create a class gmail account and will be shown the class website. They will use the website to post weekly and possibly to upload future work and/or projects.

So far so good…

Add comment September 18, 2009 eaj5450

First Impressions

Beyond that the meeting was successful yet a little overwhelming.  He told me he was available from 8:15-11ish so I came in promptly at 8:15am only to discover shortly after our meeting began that his first class actually started at 9am.  We were a little rushed and with students popping in and out of the room to say HOLA to their favorite teacher we were also a little distracted.  Since he is teaching beginning spanish a few of my ideas weren’t applicable.  He seemed to really like the idea of using Comic Life and Blogging.  I also proposed the idea to his students about using clickers in lessons of even the text polling system that we used in the class last week.  The students were surprisingly reseptive to all of my ideas.  I actually explained all of them to the students while he was in the hall talking to another member of the faculty and when he re-entered the room and asked them to tell him what we talked about the kids responded very positively (which was a big relief for me, as was kind of shocked that after such a brief meeting I was already talking to his students about my only semi-formed ideas) and one kid half-jokingly declared “She says we’re going to have fun”.

After a kind of whirl-wind first experience I am actually very excited!  The students were great and he is a bundle of energy.  We have another meeting on Friday morning to plan a trip to the computer lab and hammer out our plans a little more solidly….though I’m not sure I’m sure what this is going to end up entailing…I guess I’ll find out Friday.  In the mean time I will be checking out Educational Blogging sites and determining which site will work best for our purposes and outlining a little more specifically possible integration of Comic Life and Clickers and/or a polling system.  He also asked me if we could use iPod Touches to which I responded that was a possibility….however I am a little hesitant on that front because only a handful of his students have them and only about half of the class has an actual iPod…  we’ll see.

I’m not going to lie…I’m both nervous and excited, but I like to think it’s mostly excited.

ps.  Now I really want to sing a song called “Nervous but Excited”…

1 comment September 17, 2009 eaj5450

Purpose

Hey!  This will be used to track the progress of my practicum project for my class on Applied Teaching and Technology.  Updates soon to come!

Add comment August 29, 2009 eaj5450