Update after...oh, it's been a year

Wow, amazing how time flies. Only when I was checking my Gmail account did I suddenly remember, "oh, I've got a Blogger account I haven't used in a while!" Anyway, the basics: I am now teaching at a secondary school for at-risk youth. Currently I am teaching 4 science preps and one phys. ed. class. It's busy. More to come later... hopefully sooner than a year from now though!

Marking the grade

Thought I'd post an update although I'm sure none of my classmates (former, at this point) are checking this blog anymore (if they ever were). Wound up with a "B" in the class for which I set up this site. No big surprise there, too many late assignments with the attendant point deductions. An "A" in both of my other classes though! It'd have been nice to have 3 A's but considering how busy this fall semester was, between teaching down at the outdoor ed. camp and then teaching at the high school, and traveling to and fro for Ashland, I guess I have to confess that I feel pretty good to have come out as well as I did. Ashland now wants me to repeat my student teaching, a task I am loathe to do since I did it once successfully at Kent already, and since I've taught within my certification area not once but TWICE now. Not to mention that I'd be paying to do that, slaving away per other people's subjective standards, and not making any money for rent and living expenses. Garrr...

Well, here's to hoping that 2009 will be a good year!

Pinch me, am I done?

I am so relieved to finally be wrapping up this semester! I knew I was going to be in for a rough journey from the start, trying to balance the 24-hour demands of outdoor education camp with my course load, but to top it off I went right into taking over teaching for a science teacher at Wooster High School at the conclusion of camp back at the beginning of November. My background is earth science; I took over for a biology/anatomy & physiology teacher. Lots of preparation, we'll leave it at that. I was not able to maintain an "A" average in the end for my educational technology class, but it was not a total waste; I really learned some new and fascinating things throughout the course. One more class to finish off and then this semester will be a wrap. I'm looking forward to a long stretch of sleep....

Let's make a movie...

So I took over teaching duties this past week for a science teacher who just had surgery. Anatomy and Physiology, and Biology. A&P is going to be a bit of a stretch for me, but I have pretty good kids so that helps tremendously. I also have a pretty good bunch of sophomores in my biology class. Once I finish off a few projects for Ashland I should be in good shape to really devote a lot of attention to the lessons I've been left to teach my classes.

One nice thing this week is that I was able to borrow a pretty nice digital SLR and shoot some photos of a chemistry class working in the lab. I then used iMovie on my Mac to slap together a movie, complete with f/x and soundtrack, using those photos. I don't think the movie itself is all that special (it would have been nice to use some actual video footage) but I think it presents a decent picture of lab work. I don't know that I'll use iMovie much for my own teaching, but I think it will be an effective tool for allowing students to shoot videos or pictures and then put together something meaningful. Movie-making certainly is a very nice, creative outlet for kids to put together neat presentations that they can have fun with (I know it was fun for me!). Like anything else tech-related, making this movie was initially a painfully-slow learning process, but it was really exciting in the end to see what a little bit of time and effort could produce.

I don't know how long it will be available, but here is the link for my movie if anyone cares to see it: http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=83948d11f68baa8ae4a6

Until next time...

Tum, ta-Tum Tum Tum

I am FINALLY in my last week of outdoor education down in the far reaches of Richland/Ashland Counties and you better believe I'm looking forward to its end. It's challenging enough with three classes and a job, but trying to balance them with the 24-hour demands of camp has been a nightmare. For example, one does not get adequate, re-energizing sleep when a boy vomits all over a cabin at 3 a.m. and it's up to you to get the boy to the clinic, wake teachers up, comfort the kid, go clean up the mess without waking 17 other sleeping boys, and THEN try to get back to sleep and be ready to go full-bore the next day from wake-up to lights-out.

I've heard back from one other counselor so far regarding the geology PowerPoint that I put together for my EDCI 505 hypermedia assignment, and she thought it was well-done and useful. Yay! I passed it along to seven other people as well and am hoping for more feedback as far as what's good and what needs tweaking. I was late once again though getting the next assignment done for that class. Ugh, I don't know that an "A" is going to be possible for me in the class at this point but I continue to hope that the work I'm doing will contribute to the greater good of being useful to me and to others down the road.

Day late and a dollar short

Really got behind the 8-ball with my Hypermedia project. I tried to be really ambitious in creating a self-test/tutorial covering local geology for the camp where I work. Assembling all the content alone was very time-consuming, and then going through the steps of putting the non-linear presentation format together doubled the amount of time put into the final product. In the end I feel I created a useful tool for the camp's staff to use, but I was a week late in submitting the project for my class. Ugh. I can only hope that the professor will give me at least some credit for having completed it. Of course I'm now behind in the assignment that was due this past Sunday night. Sigh. Hope to have it done no later than Wednesday.

Anyway, back to the presentation. I've used PowerPoint for traditional note presentations before and hated it. I feel that drawing and writing things by hand is so much faster, and I think people feel more at ease when they see concepts or diagrams diagrammed by hand (it's much easier to copy someone's hand-drawn work, I think). So, when I give notes to classes I prefer much more traditional means, such as writing everything up on the chalkboard/whiteboard or using an overhead projector. PowerPoint, up to now, I've felt was only good for showing slideshows of pictures only. But I do have to admit that knowing now how PowerPoint can be used to create non-linear hypermedia projects is really cool! I can see now how effective these can be for making self-paced tutorials. I suppose once a person's made a few of these and has his/her own version of a standard format that this could be a very cool tool to employ in teaching, but man is it time-consuming the first time around!

One of the camp directors and several counselors have downloaded copies of my presentation, and I'm anxiously awaiting their feedback regarding how effective they think it will be as a teaching aid. I can already see areas where I can make some changes though. As it stands now, the only way to get to the tutorial slides in the file is to select wrong answers to questions on the self-quiz slides. I either need to be sure people are aware of this short-coming or go back and create some hyperlinks on the main page that will go directly to the tutorial pages. Live and learn, I guess.

Anyway, time to get cracking on my overdue next project...

Deadlines, deadlines...

Finished my Visual Learning assignment last night just under the due time. As usual, had a bunch of things demanding my attention, concern number 1 being the loss of my cellphone on Saturday night. Wouldn't you know it, after a long, fruitless search on Saturday night and again Sunday morning and afternoon, the dumb thing was found--of course, after I'd already been to Alltel and gone through the rigamarole of getting a new one. Grrrr....

Anyway, the assignment. Here it is in all its glory. I actually enjoyed checking out all the different templates on Inspiration but found some things a little frustrating. I think part of my prolem as well is that I'd much rather draw things like this out by hand. I'm sure one could become quite skilled and adept at quickly putting a graphic organizer together on the computer, but still prefer looking at someone's hand-drawn work. To me, the ability to draw something from memory is much more useful than fancy, computer-generated work. The luddite in me speaks out, I guess.