Day 18

I showed Rosemary the current version of the game today. She made a few design suggestions-on the title page there should be space around the print because the eye is looking for it, and the font for the one page style was too big. The font had been bothering me all along-trying to get the letters in the same place on each card. By changing the size it is a little easier to be more consistent with placement. I made the changes she suggested and it looks much better.

We also decided some of the videos should be remade-we checked with one of the preschool teachers who is deaf and she said that the preschool children did not sign some of the words the way they were in the video. I watched the movie with the teacher I was videotaping after we finished and I didn't pick up on the problems until later. Partly maybe it was that she was the expert, not me. There is also the fact that sign language can be regional and I don't know for sure what is used here as opposed to what we sign at home. Maybe I also just need more practice doing it and knowing what I should be looking for. It's frustrating though wondering when it will click and I won't have to go back and redo things. I emailed the teacher to ask if she could come in again and do some more taping. I'm still waiting to hear back.

Rosemary also suggested changing the word part of the video so that it stayed there when the video ended instead of fading out, this way the teacher can talk about the word if she/he wants before going onto the next slide.

After I made the changes, we spent most of the rest of the day cleaning more shelves and moving the software there. We still have more to do with that, but we ran out of room. Tomorrow we will get shelves from the high school to use too.

Rosemary asked me to think about how the teachers can request software to be installed to their computers. What fields would be needed from the database and then we discussed it. She would like it to be set up so that the request would be emailed to her. The database is searchable by title, publisher and keywords (i.e. addition, matching, patterns etc.) so we discussed how the teachers could make choices and then submit the request. One possibility we came up with was to use the same system that teachers are able to use to request equipment. When the database man is back from vacation we will meet with him about it.

After it is decided how to do this we will need to make a handout for the teachers explaining the procedure.

I also had the opportunity to help one of the teachers with making some changes in the formatting of her Word document.