Update on goals

Well, two weeks have passed since I set my goals.   How are you progressing toward your goals?  I made two goals for summer school.  First, I wanted my students to increase their understanding of how technology could help them learn on their own and how technology could help them create products which will grab other people's attention.  Secondly, I want to learn from my students what best meets their needs.  How am I doing?

The first goal is going well.  The students have learned how to take still pictures and mold them together into a movie.  The learned to add sound to the moving pictures and some of them will be adding narration to them shortly.  Students have learned to us digital photo editing software to change digital photos and make them look more like paintings.  Student have learned to create PowerPoint presentation with text and images.  Student have also learned to make simple web sites using a fantastic WYSIWYG interface at www.weebly.com.  The first goal is going well.

The second goal is a little more difficult to quantify.  I could see quickly that certain students learned more quickly than others and certain students needed more help guidance.  Some were more independent and some wanted to check in with me every few minutes to see if what they were doing was correct.  Moving around the classroom and asking the students questions is a quick way to assess their needs.  Also looking at the work they are producing to see if it matches the goal of the project or the assignment.  I need to create another form for the artist project.  This form will have blanks for the students to fill in to prompt them to answer the questions they need to answer in order to assess each artist's work.