What I learned in...

Do you remember the book What I Need To Know I learned In Kindergarten ? Well, this post is more about what I learned in the first days of school. Some good, some not so good. To get it out of the way I will begin with the not so good:

- First, our school is going through a major renovation which I believe is about 3-5 behind schedule. This led to not having all of technology up and running when school began.
- Schedules were a work in progress for several weeks.
- Laptops did not work because of blocks on students until all AUP (acceptable use policies) forms were turned in and students could be allowed to even sign into computers, much less use the Internet
- When laptops did work, the Internet went down again.
- I got bronchitis and missed a lot of school

Now for some of the good:
+ I have a greaaaat class of students! That makes up for almost all of the frustrations (except for the frustrations the students have felt about the technology)
+ We have several tech-savvy people who are willing to go above and beyond to help us fix our technology issues. We truly appreciate their help and understanding when we get very frustrated and cranky.
+ I was told about a site where you can download a free program called Blender. I have not had the time to work with it but one of my students said it is awesome. It is supposed to compare to Photoshop.
+ The culture of our school has undergone a very positive change this year. We have seven new teachers (we are still waiting for two more new teachers to come on board) and they are a very diverse group. While a few are from WV, one is from Romania, one from Peru, one from India, one from Virginia, one from China and one from Detroit, which is kind of like a foreign place to our rural students. All of the new teachers are doing a fantastic job and I believe this has given new life to the teachers that have been here a while.
+ The students have been very receptive to this diverse group of teachers and responding well to the new alternating block schedule.
+ I am now feeling much better, not well, but much better than I was.
So while there have been great frustrations about some things, the overall atmosphere of the school is hopeful and positive. To my students, write your blog about your impressions of the first weeks of school. Discuss your hopes and expectations (and maybe your fears!) about your learning in the Globaloria program this year. To fellow teachers, please comment about your experiences so far this year and...Gooooo Gloabaloria!
Squirrel!

Challenges

To my students for the upcoming school year: Are you ready? Are you ready to meet the challenges of our school being in the middle of a major renovation and having to navigate through all of the construction? More importantly, are you ready to be a creative problem solver who will look for ways to challenge YOURSELF to make relevant, interesting, structured, challenging (notice a trend here?) games in Globaloria this year?
Let me say right now that the most important part of this whole learning experience is not just the game, it is the PROCESS that you will go through if you follow the course schedule for the program. After two years in the Globaloria program, I firmly believe that letting the wiki guide the user through this learning journey will enable them to be successful.
Looking forward to having fun and adventure with you this year. If you read this before school starts, be thinking about what YOU want to accomplish this year.

Goals for the upcoming year

My personal game making goals have to do with me being much more proficient in Flash. It seems that I have forgotten everything that I used to know about Flash. I know that this is my own fault - 'if you don't use it, you lose it'; that is what has happened with me. I hope to develop my skills across the board with Flash, from drawing to Action Script.
I also plan to start out differently, students will be given highly detailed assignments and only a certain amount of time to complete them in the beginning. They will be required to post a blog at least once a week. SInce the class will be 90 minutes on alternating days. I would like to have the students complete their games by late January.
I will also post subject matter that their games can be about. That list I am still working on. Students will be in teams of two.
That is the plan so far...

Pride

Well, they say pride goeth before a fall so I hope that this is not the case for what I am about to say. I am so proud of our students and their presentations! They did a wonderful job of presenting, especially considering that we had some problems to overcome that day. If you view their presentation videos you will see and hear some of those problems.
First of all, we are just beginning the renovation of Greenbrier West and the day of the presentation was when they decided to excavate right outside of my classroom windows. And I mean RIGHT OUTSIDE OF MY WINDOWS! In fact, I think they actually hit the wall a few times with the excavator bucket. The telephone with a built in speaker was not available, that went on the fritz the day before our presentations and there was not another room available with a landline and a Smart Board to present with so we had to use a cell phone which left the sound quality not the best. We also had the electrician come through at least 6 times to get to the utility room which is accessed through my storage room and he cut the power one time. I was trying to recover from a very hoarse voice, at least 6 announcements were made over the intercom during the presentations and we have lost our air conditioning so it was very hot in the room.
Two of our students were also supposed to be going with the sophomores to a Career day event so they had to arrange for alternative transportation to the event.
With all of that going on and the students being very nervous about the day, I thought they all did a tremendous job with their presentations. We all want to work on their games more extensively and that tells me that they are fully engaged and wanting to learn. That is what this is all about, isn't it? Having students go through a process that makes them want to learn. I am very proud of that.

education

What is education to you? Is it just your time in school or are there other aspects of 'education'? What are your thoughts about education? I hear students say "I can't wait until graduation; I can't wait to get out of here." Why? What is it that leads sutdents to say that? Are they just tired of the process? Do they think everything will magically come to them without as much knowledge or 'education' as they can accumulate? Tell me your thoughts...

Degrees of Separation

It's all in the details isn't it? While one person will not react at all to something someone says, someone else will take offense. I say this because I have been thinking about the girl in New Jersey who committed suicide because of harrassment and it seems that more students here are saying that they are being picked on or being taunted. I can remember (yes, I'm not too old to remember!) in Junior High and High School catching on to the fact that if I reacted negatively to remarks that fellow students would make then they would continue to make them. I think it is something about a power trip with some people. If they can get another student to react then they can feel that they have some power. Isn't that sad? There must be something in their lives that is not too good if they feel that they have to bring another person down to make themselves feel more powerful. It seems to be the nature of the beast. I am not excusing those people at all but I did learn not to give those kinds of people the power over me. I would ignore them or respond back with some type of lowkey response so they would not know that it affected me. It seemed to abate the situation and kept from happening more often.
I tried to teach my own children that, to not let others dictate your actions, or reactions. I find it very distressing that some students are allowed to just stay home from school instead of addressing the problem in some way. What are we teaching our children? I am not saying that there needs to be a big confrontation but there needs to be some type of dialogue between parents, teachers, students, whomever. Don't just quit.
That leads to another problem - absences. I know, I know, you have probably heard enough from me about this, but when did it become ok to blow off school to go skating? to go shopping? to just stay home because the student DIDN'T FEEL LIKE COMING TO SCHOOL? You can't learn if you are not here, there is no degree of seperation on that.

Grandson's input

So I had my daughter and her family in this weekend for our annual Ruffed Grouse Society banquet that my husband co-chaired and my grandson and I had some time to go and look at our students's work. I had shown him their work when he was visiting us before and he asked if he could look at their work again. He is 7, reads very well and loves computer games so I feel that his opinion is valuable. We looked at our students' progress that was posted; he especially liked Team SEE's house with the clickable items. I know that our students are doing a great deal more then is shown, they just aren't posting as frequently as I would like. My grandson and I looked at the games on "Playing to Learn" link. I will have to say that he was shocked when he clicked on the first couple of links because they were 'shooter' games and he is not allowed to play games where the player shoots at PEOPLE. I tried to explain to him why they were on there and what they were about but we went on to others games. We especially liked the one about the Preamble; he read all of the questions, we tried to logically come up with the answeres for the ones we weren't sure of and I was very impressed with his reading skills, his knowledge of the different states and critical thinking skills (ok, I do have to brag a little bit, after all, I am a grandmother!) As for the game, it was great! It had wonderful graphics, sounds and good questions and transitions. Check it out:
http://http://www.texaslre.org/PiratePreamble/pirates_game.html