Week+8+Journal

Sunday January 10 - Saturday January 16


 * Sunday - I've spent so much time at this point working on the video, I'm ready to strangle myself. I had a lot of trouble with picasa. Every time I would type on my picture and then hit apply the picture would disappear. I would have to start over importing the picture again. I did this for about three hours before giving up. When I went back later on, I didn't have any trouble. I was able to type on the pictures & apply this and it was fine.
 * Monday - I have spent much of my time lately creating a prezi for the district's new bond campaign. I know this doesn't have to do with the grant class, but it does have to do with things I've learned in the grant class. I learned of prezi through here. I wanted to practice creating one before I decided if it was right for me and my classroom. Well, I spent many hours creating this and my husband said "what? you've spent two weeks on that and it's 30 seconds long?" I could have killed him. Back to the point. . . I really liked it for in my classroom and have plans to switch over some of my larger chapter pp to a prezi. I think the kids would love it. However, you can only use the desktop as a 30 day trial, otherwise you have to pay for it. I hate to rely on the internet for lessons at school, sometimes the internet is down. Here's the link for my Community Dialogue Meeting prezi. [] I hate when I can't get the text to make a link on this mac.
 * Wednesday - My reading classes have spent last week (2 school days) and this week (5 school days) in the computer lab creating our book report digital stories. I guess overall it went pretty well. I became frustrated because most of them just didn't follow simple directions. I typed out step-by-step directions for them that they took with them, but I don't think they even looked at them once they got into the lab. Many did not put the plot elements on their slides, so they would have to redo them. Many put their last names on the opening slide, which I said over & over not to do. Many didn't fix the mistakes in their book report, so the same mistakes were on the digital movie (i.e. writing incorrect themes). Then I wanted to upload the movies so they could show their families. Progress Book couldn't upload that kind of format. So I created a google site for each of my reading classes. No problem uploading them. But once I started watching them online, they were running the kids username under the video. (Looks like 15LastNameFirstName) So then I had to take all the videos down. Here is the link to one of my sites (they both look the same), but there's nothing on it. [] I will keep the two sites though, for when we do The Outsiders webquest.
 * Thursday - After all the trouble I had with moviemaker and it running their usernames on the video, I plan to use picasa next year. I'm just worried that with all the trouble I had using picasa the kids would too, and they'd never figure out how to fix it. But the picasa videos would upload easier to a google site too.