Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Tuesday, January 31

Hello!

We are starting our new project today - Tuesday. This one is over rocks/minerals. The students are working in their groups for the project and using the class wiki page to post their information. There is some confusion over the link for putting images on their pages, but I showed them how to do it a couple of other ways. The people at wikispaces have worked on the wikis and it looks a little different than it did last time we were on there. I had to play around with it before I found out what works with the images.

We will be in the computer lab tomorrow and Thursday, so that the students can get a good start on their research. They can look at home, too. It will be okay, however, I do want them to do most of it in the classroom, so they are not just sitting in here with nothing to do.

I still need to put the grades in the computer for their Photo story projects. It just takes time to go through all of them, since I am grading each students' part of the project. This next project will be graded the same way. I have told the students that I will need a copy of who is responsible for which part of the project. They are using today, after the video, to decide those parts. They will be ready to go tomorrow, when we go to the lab.

Well, this gets us caught up on what we are doing for the next couple of weeks. There will be an oral presentation at the end of this project, so the students can go over what they have found with the rest of the class. Have a great rest of your day. Email me, if you have any questions.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Monday, January 23

Hello to all!!

It has been several weeks, since I have been on here and what a wild several weeks it has been!!!! The students have been working on their photo story over the biome their group was assigned. It took some time to get the research completed and then more time to get their information recorded to the pictures they found. Some decided that they did not like the sound of their voices, and elected to be in front of the class to present orally. I gave them a checklist to make sure that they had ever part of the story in their's. There was one part about the biome that they were supposed to put first in the story and then the rest could go in whatever order they chose. Once the stories were completed, I put them on my flash drive and showed them to the class. I wanted the groups to email me their stories, but the program wouldn't let them. The computers were not set up for it. This worked out okay, though. Once we finish everything with these stories and this topic, we are going to review cells for a couple of days because their 2nd quarterly assessment did not turn out very well. After that, we are going to start on rocks and minerals. We have a wiki project set up for that. I am sorry that I have not been on here sooner, but it has been very hectic here and we have been busy learning a new program and learning about organisms. My goal is to be back on here once a week. So, I am going to be positive and optimistic and say I will talk to you next week! :-)