2 weeks worth...

So I forgot to blog last week (March 2-6) so I'm going to blog 2 weeks worth this time.

March 2-6 I had my students using a fun piece of technology. In my classroom I have a SMART board and Senteo "clickers" which are like interactive remote controls. The end of the quarter was approaching and we have to give what we call a common assessment at the end of each quarter. Well in my one class I knew a review would help them. Using the senteo program I created a trivia game. I displayed the questions on the SMART board and the students, who were in teams, entered their answers. When everyone has entered their response I revealed the correct answer and we discussed it. The cool thing about the clickers is you can quickly see what percentage answered correctly or incorrectly. It's very handy to know immediately if a question stumped a class so I know what we may need to review. The students said the review really helped them to remember everything we had covered. (The common assessment was comprehensive) I was very happy that the majority of the students did correctly answer questions that we had covered back in September! The majority did really well on their assessment. I think creating a game like this where there is no pressure really helps. Most students think they can't remember stuff from the beginning of the year but playing this game helped them to see they could. I think this helped to put their minds at ease so when they took the test they were relaxed and confident.

Last week I did my technology lesson to my interior design students. It went ok... I spent a few hours getting the computer lab ready, getting all necessary programs downloaded and installed. I created a handout for them to reference and I went through the project step-by-step with them. They were ready and excited for this project. The project was using Panorama Factory to create 360 degree virtual tours of rooms which they then had to identify the elements & principles (which we had been studying) in that room. Their next step was to create an audio file using Audacity identifying each element or principle. Finally they put their Quick-time file (what panorama factory creates), their audio file and a brief description of what we will be viewing onto a web page they would create (which I taught them to do earlier in the semester). Well we ran into an issue (of course)! The program kept shutting down when they would go to save their final projects. I have contacted Panorama factories tech support SEVERAL times but no one seems interested in responding to me. So now I'm a little stuck. I have 38 unfinished projects because we can't finish the project, I have 38 unhappy students because all the work they've done is wasted and I'm very unhappy because when I demonstrated this to them it worked perfectly. Over the weekend I have found an online program that is free and very similar to what I was doing with them. The only downfall is the program I was using would allow my to embed their files on my web page. This online program I don't think will allow me to do that. I'm still playing though to find out more. Technology can be so fun but so disappointing too...