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

Art and Science

So David and Andrew came into our classroom to do some filming, getting some interviews and film footage of our Globaloria classroom. One of the topics that was discussed was how this class is a correlation between an Art teacher (me) and a Science teacher (Mrs. Leef). TO me this is not an anomoly because if you really think about it Art is everywhere. It is in all of the surroundings around us each day, from the simple pencils we use to write with to the most complex of machines that make our lives much simpler (??) to the art that is produced for our viewing pleasure. With new technology comes new ways to express our artistic impulses. Art is not just about painting, drawing, and sculpture; it is also about light, motion, color and how we perceive our world and our place in it. Like to hear more? Click on this site to hear a piece on NPR about an artist trained at MIT and how he uses technology in his artistic endeavors: http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=4176103&m=4176104

Spring

"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." ~Anne Bradstreet
"No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow." ~Proverb
I know that it has been a long time since I posted, I can only say that Spring had not got to me yet!
Please post your thoughts about the above quotes.