Day 6

Week of 7/18/05
Total # of hours worked for this week=40
Total # to date for internship=80

Today we made changes to the Team 4-5 blog. Instead of clicking on word links to access the videos, we changed them to picture links.
The teacher showed the students the blog today. Rosemary sent an email inviting the staff to come see the blog so they have begun getting comments. One of the teacher's sent the link to his sister in Washington State. Her class added several comments and asked lots of questions. Later in the afternoon Rosemary had a phone call from the teacher who received the original email saying his sister's class would like to have a video communication with our students. Arrangements were made for Wednesday afternoon. We don't know yet if it will be video IM or video conferencing. I have seen a demo of videoconferencing but not video IM. While this will be really great it makes our job harder because there is not a lot of time left before summer school ends.

Today Rosemary videotaped a math story while I went up to preschool. There are still two more math stories to video. We videotaped two teachers from Team 6-7-8 today and tomorrow we will video four students. For Team 6-7-8 Rosemary setup a new blog and invited me to join so I can contribute. The video about the overall summer school also needs to be made. They originally wanted to show it Thursday afternoon. We are hoping we can postpone it until Friday to give us more time.

Tomorrow first thing we need to set up two Smartboards- one for Team 6-7-8 so the teacher can introduce their blog and one in preschool where we will try an alphabet matching computer program. While we were meeting with the preschool teacher to show her the program I commented that its a shame it does not have sign language. Rosemary and I discussed it later and thought that the concept is simple enough we should be able to do something similar in PowerPoint. I'm going to fool around with the idea and see what I can come up with.

Since the blog has begun to go public we have had to remove some pictures of one of the students whose parents would not sign permission for her picture to be put online. This presented an HTML problem when Rosemary deleted the picture. When you put the picture up Blogger does all of the coding. When you take it off it doesn't always remove all of the coding.