Week+9+Journal

Wednesday - Kathy and I were able to figure out how to remove the student information from the movie maker digital stories. So I had to go back to the lab and have all of the kids remove their information. We didn't have any problems, this seemed to go real well. Then I started uploading them to our class site. Of course, one of the first ones I uploaded had the kid's last name on the first slide, after I had said (what felt like 500 times) not to have your last name anywhere on the video. Still in the end, some had misspellings and other errors, but overall I think they turned out great.

Thursday - I have started getting my end organized as far as The Outsiders webquest. I changed it around some, to better fit our needs. We will start this activity this week in reading. We will put our findings on our class site (the same one that has our videos). I'm very excited about this activity. I have put a lot of time in organizing & preparation, so I hope it goes easier on all of us, than the movie maker projects.

Friday - When I read the grad credit this week I swore it said one question then an OR and another question. Well, when I got home Friday evening and read the grad credit again, there was no OR. And, I needed my similarities & gaps papers that I left at school. So I couldn't complete the work over the weekend. I watched the tpack videos and read the articles. I believe that the technology, pedagogy and content works well in the tpack. My intitial thoughts were, yeah this makes perfect sense. There does need to be an overlap of all three to properly teach the students in an engaging way. I do see tpack influencing my curriculum in the fact that I want to bring in more technology into the classroom.

However, I'm getting burned out on this class. So far the focus seems to be about collaborative & cooperative group work, project based learning, differentiated instruction & so forth. Where are those philosophies in this grad credit? I haven't seen any. It's just read & write. I understand the regular weekly work includes those, but not the grad credit.

Sunday - I did try to do my grad credit on Friday day, but the Moodle must have been down. Since I couldn't do my work for the week I did a little extra reading on the internet. Here's one movie I found about a book recommendation on tpack. [| http://jerrybates.posterous.com/get-tpack-0] (Yuck! I still can't get those links to work the way I want on this mac.)