Half Way There!

“When you have completed 95 percent of your journey, you are only halfway there.”

~ Japanese Proverb

So far so good. . . or so I think!  I have managed to learn a lot already this semester and I plan to use a large amount of these new skills in my classroom setting in the future.  Learning how to set up digital scavenger hunts for students has been a great skill to acquire.  I found the activity of learning how to do a slide show in google presentations extremely handy for classroom material and student based activities, not to mention I can now have this handy tool at my finger tips for my next kidding season on the farm.  Imagine how nice it will be to set up kidding pictures in a google presentation that I can place on my farm website for clients!  Very handy all around!

Now as we have reached our halfway mark I feel pretty good about all of the information I have been able to work towards learning.  One thing that I am really excited to have a chance to learn is going to be the use of whiteboards that we are about to start in this new second portion of the class.  I really wished I had already learned about whiteboards as it could have been useful in one of my other class mock teaching experiences I had last week.  I look forward to learning as much about new technologies in the classroom as we can possibly fit into our class time this semester.  I am not the most skilled computer user so I have actually found the use of Mac's in the classroom a little helpful since I am a PC person.  Now if I end up in a school setting that only has Mac's for use I can feel a bit more confident with the equipment.  Goodness I still remember when I thought I was very computer savvy in Elementary school (middle school, as our elem and mid school was in the same school).  They had some of us loading and setting up the younger students that had issues booting their computers. . . mind you it was the big huge old computers with green font and the big floppy disks!  I haven't used dos commands in so long. . . hopefully all of this new technology will become as second nature as those older systems that I had once known so well! 

Mi Picasa o su Picasa

"Searching is half the fun: life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party."

~Jimmy Buffett

I truly believe students would be able to enjoy and retain more information when the task is presented in a scavenger type activity.  I would expect to use a portion of our class time during a discussion on forces for students to work on a digital scavenger hunt.  Students could search for items for examples of balanced and unbalanced forces, negative velocity, changing velocity, friction and find three people demonstrating acceleration.  

One thing that we did learn during our class session is that if students are using phones for their camera there can be issues with downloading the pictures.  If the room is located in a poor service area the students may have to leave the room to find a better signal.  Once we were able to download our images the process was less painless.  I do think students would be more motivated in a classroom setting that used digital scavenger hunts to advance their understanding of content material.  We just need to be ready to handle any technical issues that may arise.  As we learned even the best devices can have technical problems from time to time.
    

"Ah-ha" The Great Inquiry Based Activity

"Never be afraid to do something new.  Remember, amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic."

~ Anonymous

I truly believe the quote I listed above is supporting many tasks we are learning to take on in order to become great teachers!  As I created a large portion of my IBA during last Monday's night class I was initially concerned when I first opened it on my laptop to continue work from home. . . My laptop appears to have a different screen size setting then the computer in the lab. . . Hummm then I start to wonder which setting our teacher would have on his computer when viewing our IBA's. . .  As my mind kept rambling on over which formatting size for the pictures I was using in the heading portion of two of my pages would appear in proper size proportions on my teachers computer. . .  I finally just had to give in to my pondering concerned mind to set it at ease.  I formatted the pictures to appear correct on my laptop and just hope that they look ok on the other computers that it can be viewed upon.  With this being said I think it is very important that teachers take into consideration of what the school computers or the most common computer settings that their students may have access to in order to design their IBA's or Webquests in formats that can be easily viewed without distracting features such as images that now are improperly spaced and between two lines instead of lining up together on one line even it is is going to show up centered to the left on some screen settings.

My father always told me that "great minds go in circles" and I think I can truly agree that great minds do go in circles.  Since I feel that my rambling mind has allowed me to focus on the best way to address formatting issues. . . Therefore a rambling mind is not rambling but just being a great mind by going in circles!