Never Assume!

Never assume that assets that were posted a week or two ago will always be available. I've tried to open the links to the webex sessions about creating buttons and various other sessions and I'm getting the message that the urls have expired. Is that the case for other Globaloria teachers? I would like to know if that is true or if it is a glich in our program alone.
The good news is that several of our students are picking up flash techniques at a pretty good rate, without these tutorials. Have a look at the projects pages of our students and check out some of their first efforts.
We plan to have our students 'go surfing' tomorrow, checking out other schools' postings, so if you have some new flash creations posted and read this in time, let me know so I can guide our students to them.
Happy flashing!

Students,
It has been an interesting week, a great deal of new information has been brought forth from the wikis, blogs and new Adobe Flash. It has been very interesting to see the varying levels of adeptness with the new information; some students hesitant to go too quickly (which is perfectly ok) and others trying to see as fast as possible what will work (which is perfectly ok). Everyone learns and adapts differently and we are still feeling our way through on building a class 'team spirit'. As we learn and grow roles will be established, who's good at this, who's good at that, ways for us to work together and build a repertoire of knowledge that everyone can tap into. The number issue for me as a classroom teacher is to make sure that you are being safe on the Internet. Go to Ingrida Barker's blog at http://ingridasblog.blogspot.com:80/ and read her posting and review the two short movies that are posted there. She also has some good links to places to get information about working in Flash and the Web. Look those over and write in your blog about these entries.
Happy blogging!

Good Intentions!

My intentions were good, I have everything planned out on what and when and how we would begin and then wham!... We arrived back at school to find our new schedule had major problems. The first 3 weeks of school has been a constant stream of schedule changes for many students so we (coteacher Angie Leef) didn't want to begin Globaloria until we had our class roster set in stone.
It really worked out ok though since we also needed to create two 3 minute videos for another school grant proposal. It will tie in well though with some of our Globaloria projects since the grant proposal concerns environmental components and I know that some of our students will be leaning toward games that are about the environment.
It all works out doesn't it?
And maybe that is the thought that we (I) need to keep in mind. That if we keep a positive attitude and the thought that 'it will all work out', things usually do work out. I can remember my mother and I talking about the fact (and this is a fact!) if you start out the day thinking that it is going to be a bad day; things go wrong in the morning and we get the mind set that everything else is going to be bad... then YOU WILL HAVE A BAD DAY! Whereas, if you decide that you aren't let things get to you, your day will usually improve. If my students would keep that thought in mind I think they would enjoy their days more. I'm certainly not saying that they have to verbalize it to me or to others but just keep that positive thought that 'things will usually work out' in their own minds, then things will go better.
SO I close this post with the thought - What can you do to make your day go better?