Day 7

I met with the preschool teacher this morning about changing the group activity to a different day. Rosemary suggested I come down and do individual children instead. When I went down it was like yesterday. All the children crowded around me wanting a turn. We were only doing two today. Both were very good with the mouse. They had a little difficulty matching the letters, so I decided in the power point game to limit the number of choices to three, since that is what they were using. For this first version I am also color coding to increase the likelihood of success. I got the idea from the game we were originally going to use before deciding to make one.

Prior to going to preschool Rosemary and I went down to team 6/7/8 to set up the Smartboard. I learned two things about hooking up to the internet.
1. Make sure the ethernet cable is connected on both ends.
2. Sometimes you have to wait a few seconds for the connection to occur and watch for the lights before assuming it doesn't work.

Rosemary introduced the blog to the students. Although the teachers think it is great, they are not yet comfortable with it. They do plan to use it as a writing opportunity by making comments. After introducing the blog, we asked for volunteers. Instead of four or five like we expected almost everyone wanted to participate. We spent the most of the morning making those videos. This blog is more of a vlog (video log) as discussed in Andy Carvin's blog dated July 12, 2005.

The afternoon I spent making the PowerPoint game. It's not finished yet.

I'm making an ABC matching game with a fruit and vegetable theme which they are currently studying. Between fruits and vegetables and words connected to them like "harvest" I have almost all of the letters done. I still need something for I and X.
After the child picks the correct answer, the screen will go to a page that shows the written letter and the fingerspelling handshape. For this I am photographing my hand against a dark background so it is clear. After looking at that, a button takes them to the next page which starts as the fingerspelling handshape (a drawn figure) and then fades out to a fruit or vegetable picture. We have thought about putting the American Sign Language sign in video with the picture but there will not be time this week. Maybe after ESY is finished.

Rosemary talked to someone at the school in Washington State about the conference tomorrow. It will be a video conference since both schools have the technology for it. In the morning we have one more math story to videotape. I have to finish the PowerPoint game but I am not sure what I want to do about wrong answers. I will have to discuss it with Rosemary tomorrow. We also need to work on the video about summer school. Thursday the students will begin making presentations. The teachers wanted them to show their scrapbooks and were considering scanning them and putting them in a PowerPoint. I suggested using the Elmo, that way the student can slip his book under it and show his favorite page. There just is not enough time for all it would involve.

After lunch we have to set up for the video conference. We will attempt to connect early to make sure everything is working before involving the students.