Spring Break

For this week:

• Got an iPad…not really class related, but amusing none-the-less.
• No clubs as we are off school for Spring Break.
• Miscellaneous organizing – 2-3 hours – Looking over the data I have from pretests in hopes of extrapolating the post test results.  Planning on using part of this week to clean up the tutorial before rolling it out for the students.  Wrote my abstract.

Reading Reviews…

For this week:

• Club Session – +3 hours – This weeks session began with the students reading various reviews of games written on the website 1up.  Students worked as teams to figure out a game’s Plot, Setting, Theme, and Characters by simply reading the review.  As a class we shared these responses.  Students were then given the second half of the session to play games.
• Organizing – +2 hours – I have begun compiling the results of my pretest from StudyIsland and placing them into an Excel document.  Also, I have begun erasing the pretest results from the StudyIsland program, otherwise the site averages those scores into the posttest.

Catch up…

For this week:

• Club Session – +3 hours – This week was catch up for the students who had missed any previous sessions.  Because this week is a short week before Spring Break, I had assumed a small turn-out.  Following this session, in two weeks, the students will complete their final club for my project where they will begin to take notes on their game while using the interactive tutorial as a guide and take the post-test.

Full Club Session

For this week:

• Club Session – +3 hours – This week we finally had a totally full turnout without any other activities interrupting the session.  We began with a review of literary elements, using a PowerPoint to highlight each of the terms and associate them with various games.  Students were then broken into small groups in order to play a few games.  While playing, students were asked to pay attention to the various elements within their games and a discussion was held about each at the end.

Club held again…plans being organized

For this week:

• Lesson Planning – +3 hours – plans have been initially laid out in our school format.  Following this, I plan to figure out a way to make this more visually stimulating for the user.
• Club Session – +3 hours – Final students have taken their pretest.  Control group students were randomly selected from other students who take clubs on various days and most have finished their pretests as well.  During club session, students were introduced to literary elements and given product descriptions as found on various videogame sales websites.  Students were asked to find the literary elements within these descriptions and then games were played.

No meeting this week…sigh

For this week:

• Continued video work – +2 hours – Video has been entirely clipped together and voiced over.  I will be running it through a few of my students later on this week to be sure that it makes sense, then I will finalize and place it in the various slides.
• Clubs canceled – 0 HOURS – Well clubs were canceled this week due to a trip off site.  While this gave me time to get work done, it will force me to condense my lessons to save time (pre-test during non-club hours).

Video Coming Together…First Session

For this week:

• Video work – +2 hours – Worked to begin clipping videos together.  Figured out the problem with the video and projector.  Seems that PPT uses Windows Media Player to display its movies.  I need to be sure to set the overlays not to display (makes sense to me) and then the video comes through fine.  Voice over work and final cuts this week.  Needs to be ready to use is two weeks.  Dr. Ackerman asked for the links to the products that I used, and they are:

KeepVid : Download videos from youtube in formats that can be viewed through video program.0

Camtasia : Program that we used heavily in visual…screen capture and more.

WMCapture : Program to capture video in high quality…used this to get the Olympics for class use by capturing the video played on the screen.

• First session – 3 hours – I finally had my first set of kids (30) attend the club.  I will now have an additional adult in the room with me in order to help me facilitate the sessions.  Students were explained my expectations as well as introduced to the types of things that we will be doing.

Work on PPT and video, etc.

This week:

• PPT/Video – +4 hours – This week I worked with video capture software to store clips of videogames in order to prepare the tutorial.  Additionally for the video I have begun scripting the various clips.  As far as the PowerPoint goes, I have completed the skeleton, at least initially.  I will feel more comfortable with it after the clips are completed so that I can feel the flow.

Techspo and further revisions

This week:

• Techspo – All day Thursday 1-28 and Friday 1-29 (forgot to discuss in previous posting)– Techspo was fantastic and really worthwhile.  I highly recommend the individual workshops to teachers and educators across the spectrum.  For both days the Keynote Speakers were highly motivational.  Our first speaker discussed the changes in our digital natives and accommodations we should make for them as well as changes in ourselves.  The second day’s speaker discussed his view on changes that need to be made with technology in schools and how total reliance is as bad as not relying at all.  Various workshops that I took discussed everything from free software for use in the classes to 1-on-1 computing, which we will be moving to in my district this year. The agenda (and sites for their powerpoints) can be found here.
• Further revisions – +2 hours – Finished my final (?) revision for the proposal.  Added an interactive video tutorial per Dr. Ackerman’s advice. This will be used to guide the students to completing their written assignment in the lessons independently.
• Begin PPT – +2 hours – I have begun storyboarding and building the skeleton to my interactive video tutorial through PowerPoint.  When completed, it will have video, along with text, navigational buttons, etc.

Conference with Teachers…

This week:

• Teacher Conferences – 2+ hours – Most of my work this week was with the teachers in conferencing about ways to assess the student learning.  Ideas ranged from simple surveys through the Smart Response to written assessments.  Best suggestion by far seems to be in using StudyIsland.com for the assessments.
• Study Island – 1 hour – Browsed through Study Island and will most likely be using their literary elements test for assessment.  This test is randomly generated, so both times the students take it the questions will be varied.  The test is also aligned to state standards directly.
• Setting up clubs – 1 hour – Met with the afterschool coordinator and set up the dates for our club meetings as well as how we will select the students who are participating.