Monday, September 24, 2012

Already another week has ended, and with it summer.  My classes are starting to feel more comfortable both with me and I with them.  I have some really great groups this semester, I can't think of one as being more "challenging" than another.  I have been really encouraging my classes to help one another and not rely on me to answer all of their questions.  I can see that this is a change for some students as they continue to raise their hand before seeing if a peer can help first.  I'll keep working on that, as I'd like to see us all as "teachers."

Now to summarize what we are doing in each class...

Desktop Publishing:  We have had some issues with printing, so have worked out a temporary solution which so far seems to be working.  Students are saving to a shared location if they are unable to print.  I can then print, and once printed I delete the file.  We have had our first quiz, which students did well on.  I'd like to get my next quiz set up in Moodle.  We'll be learning some new tools this coming week and talking about the issue of copyright.  I also will be touching base with each student about any missing work and questions they might have.  We had a speaker come in from the Art Institutes last week - it was informative, and interesting to see so many examples of creative work.

eTechnology:  Students are becoming more independent in their work.  Some are handling this well, but I do see a few others struggle with it.  This is something I need to think about, and makes me wonder how those types of students would handle a blended learning course.  Many of the students blog posts are well written and reflective.  I need to develop a blog rubric for future blogs.  I'll also be requiring they share them with a parent or another adult.  We have wrapped up a short Word unit and will be heading to Excel next.  Excel is often one of the harder units for students.  Finally, I am going to change the PowerPoint unit.  I am considering doing some kind of digital storytelling project and have some good resources to start with.

Mac Applications:  We've covered nearly everything for our Keynote project.  Students will be working on that next week and they are due at the end of the week.  I feel that they are a bit more challenged than they were with the Pages projects we did.  A few students worked really hard to create useful projects in Pages, going so far as to design their own graphics.  I have yet to decide which application we'll be heading to next.

Finally, our student teacher is in need of some new challenges.  I can sense it :)  Last week I got him out of our area to observe a variety of classes.  This week he'll be observing my eTechnology class and then next week taking over for a few weeks.  I hope he is getting something out of his stay here.